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enThe State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desirehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/oquinn.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2006-01-01T00:00:00-05:00">January 2006</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sexuality/index.html">Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<div id="container"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Historicizing Romantic Sexuality</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Daniel O'Quinn, University of Guelph</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">The essay explores the notion of masochist nationalism through a reading of a brief passage in Equiano's Interesting Narrative in which Equiano engages with a young Musquito man named George. The argument pays particular attention to how Equiano figures George in a complex economy of humiliation and revenge. Ultimately, the essay suggests that Equiano's most radical gesture in this scene is to stage politics from the ground of the object. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><p class="epigraph"><br/>
Women to govern men . . . slaves freemen . . . being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations. . . .<br/><br/>
&#8212;Francis Bacon</p><ol><li><p>As a strategic intervention in the debate on the abolition of slavery <i>The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African</i> made its author famous, but the full import of the text is only now beginning to re-emerge.<a href="#1">[1]</a><a name="back1"> </a>The text is a complex political performance because, as Sonia Hofkosh emphasizes, "Equiano enters the political debate [on slavery] through personal experience. . . . <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> seeks to influence ('excite') the collective, political body of Parliament . . . through the vocabulary of sentiment and feeling, appealing directly to the very hearts of its individual members" (334). The preface to the 1814 edition of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> explicitly states that the representation of his sufferings is designed to elicit sympathetic affect in his readers: "Being a true relation of occurrences which had taken place, and of sufferings which he had endured, it produced a degree of humane feelings in men's minds, to excite which the most animated addresses and the most convincing reasoning would have laboured in vain" (Qtd. in Hofkosh 334). By suggesting that reason may not provide a viable political tool in the abolition of slavery, these prefatory remarks focus the reader's attention on the body itself&#8212;on precisely that which is commodified in the trade of African slaves. Hofkosh's appraisal of these remarks draws attention to the shared bodily existence of slaves and readers:</p><blockquote>The book is directed not to the reason, an abstract quantity, but seeks rather to register its effect in the very bodies of its readers&#8212;at their feet, in their hearts, and in their minds. It represents individual experience to them&#8212;both the author's and their own&#8212;creating for them an isolate, intimate space through which they can respond sympathetically to its argument. It operates from the inside out, self-referentially, narrowing its focus in order to universalize its appeal. . . . The political dimension of the text is thus articulated in libidinal language; in Equiano's abolitionist intervention, his life story, the political is personal. (334-5)</blockquote><p>The affect generated by reading about private bodily suffering is therefore crucial to Equiano's political mission.</p></li><li><p>However, if this generation of affect is to have political effects, a series of complex substitutions needs to unfold.<a href="#2">[2]</a><a name="back2"> </a>On the one hand, Equiano's suffering needs to be hollowed out such that it can exemplify the pain of commodification as such. His pain needs to synechdocally stand as part of the whole of slavery's anguish. This implies a certain cancellation of his private experience in the service of a generalizable exemplarity. On the other hand, the reader's pain, that which allows him or her to be "put into the place of another," must undergo a similar set of modulations.<a href="#3">[3]</a><a name="back3"> </a> Before this libidinal economy can be harnessed in the political project of abolishing slavery, the generated affect has to be simultaneously separated from Equiano and from the reader so that it may be attached to the space of commodification. What this means is that the effectivity of Equiano's text lies in its power to make the reader experience objecthood. Paradoxically, I believe that this is achieved by inculcating affective responses and then extracting that which we associate most directly with emotion&#8212;i.e. its specific subjective quality. In other words, libidinal language is deployed to make one understand the horrors that attend the libido's cancellation thereby founding a politics from the ground of the object. One of the aims of this essay is to demonstrate that such a politics is remarkably volatile and while apparently opening onto transgressive possibilities also seems prone to reversion in its specific manifestation in the discourse network of anti-slavery activism. However, to achieve such a demonstration requires that we bring styles of thinking endemic to queer theory to bear on the historical materialism of much recent work on the relationship between colonial and metropolitan society in Romantic studies.<a href="#4">[4]</a><a name="back4"> </a> Specifically, this essay inhabits the still underappreciated period in Foucault's thinking immediately prior to and following the publication of <i>La Volont&#233; de savoir</i> in which he attempted to articulate the relationship between sexuality, biopower, race and the regulation of the middle classes.<a href="#5">[5]</a><a name="back5"> </a>In accordance with David M. Halperin's recent reminder that Foucault's project needs to be understood as an "inquiry into the modalities of human subjectivation," this essay historicizes Equiano as a subject of desire at a particularly vexed moment in the history not only of British imperialism, but also of circum-Atlantic subjectivity (88).<a href="#6">[6]</a><a name="back6"> </a>By attempting to historicize specific scenes, desires and sexual acts in Equiano's text, one can discern not only the intersection of sexual and imperial economies, but also the largely forgotten libidinal dynamics of Dissenting religion during the period.<a href="#7">[7]</a><a name="back7"> </a></p></li><li><p>This essay examines this problematic by concentrating on a small episode in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> in which Equiano meets a young Musquito man for whom property is a largely foreign notion. The interaction between one who was formerly a commodity and one who does not yet know how commodities circulate occurs late in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>. My contention is that this complex pedagogical scene constitutes the radical core of Equiano's text and as such provides a model for understanding the libidinal exchange between reader and text articulated above. Furthermore, this scene also involves a specific historical intervention aimed at teaching the Musquito prince how to resist the commodification of his people as their region is colonized. In what I see as a symptomatic gap in the existing scholarship on this text, it is never asked who George might be.<a href="#8">[8]</a><a name="back8"> </a> Since neither Equiano's eighteenth-century readers, nor his twentieth-century exegetes seem willing to enquire after specific Musquito individuals, I want to establish George's identity and suggest that it may provide a key for understanding Equiano's textual and political strategies.</p></li><li><p>Late in 1775, shortly after Equiano undergoes a Methodist conversion, he is invited by Dr. Charles Irving to join "a new adventure, in cultivating a plantation at Jamaica and the Musquito Shore" in present day Nicaragua (202).<a href="#9">[9]</a><a name="back9"> </a> Aside from making money, Equiano's primary desire during his connection with Dr. Irving is "to be an instrument, under God, of bringing some poor sinner to my well beloved master, Jesus Christ" (202). Equiano concentrates his missionary activities on a young Musquito prince who is returning to Central America from an embassy in London. That embassy constitutes a minor moment in the British attempts to colonize the Musquito coast.</p></li><li><p>After a series of struggles with the Spanish for control of the Musquito Shore, "the British bestowed sovereignty on the Musquito Indians, i.e. on the hereditary 'king' of the Musquitos, and formed an alliance with them" (Naylor 46). As Robert Naylor argues, "the weakness of this particular protectorate system was that the territory was occupied by scattered clusters of mesolithic Indians with no formal conception of territorial domain in the western sense. . . . Therefore, the British would virtually have had to create the very [sovereign] entity to which they were allegedly allied" (46). In the late 1760s and early 1770s this fictional sovereign body became the object of intense economic speculation. Eight merchants, including William Pitt the elder, formed the Albera Poyer project, which quietly acquired vast tracts of land in the Black River district from the Musquito "king" George I, with the hope that Britain would formally colonize the region in the near future. Britain's superintendent in the region, Robert Hodgson, became convinced that the natives "were being cheated out of their lands and that the Musquito Shore was becoming 'prey to the rapacity of a few individuals'" (59). In the interest of maintaining faux-diplomatic relations with the Musquito and of foiling a land scheme that did not include him, Hodgson unilaterally declared his authority over all lands and possessions of the Musquito Indians and announced that land transactions involving the Musquito would be regulated by his office. The ensuing legal crisis is directly related to Equiano's text, for the members of the Albera Poyer project sent the Musquito king's son to London to demand that Hodgson be recalled.</p></li><li><p>When the prince is introduced into Equiano's narrative, Equiano recognizes but does not elaborate on his connection to the Albera Poyer land-scheme:</p><blockquote>Before I embarked, I found with . . . Doctor [Irving] four Musquito Indians, who were chiefs in their own country, and were brought here by some English traders for some selfish ends. One of them was the Musquito king's son, a youth of almost eighteen years of age; and whilst he was here he was baptized by the name of George. (202-3)</blockquote><p>What Equiano does not explain is that George and his companions have come to London to demand that Hodgson be recalled on the grounds that he has failed to prevent the enslavement of natives in the region. Through George, the project is attempting to obviate Hodgson's interference by having him recalled on grounds unrelated to the land scheme.<a href="#10">[10]</a><a name="back10"> </a> In other words, anti-slavery arguments are being used to further the project's plans for colonization. Robert Naylor is careful to point out the suspicious nature of this visit by emphasizing first, that the other interested party in the land transaction is George's father and second, that the principal agents in the trade of native slaves were the Musquito Indians themselves. Bolstered by their allegiance with the British, the Musquito actively captured and sold their tribal enemies to English planters.</p></li><li><p>Equiano's temporary reticence regarding this corrupt deployment of George's anti-slavery position breaks down when he attempts to give George a double lesson first in protestant election and later in capitalist exchange:</p><blockquote>In our passage I took all pains that I could to instruct the Indian prince in the doctrines of Christianity, of which he was entirely ignorant; and to my great joy he was quite attentive, and received with gladness the truths that the Lord enabled me to set forth to him. I taught him in the compass of eleven days all the letters, and he could put even two or three of them together, and spell them. I had Fox's Martyrology with cuts, and he used to be very fond of looking into it, and would ask many questions about the papal cruelties he saw depicted there, which I explained to him. (203)</blockquote><p>In this colonial encounter, the scene of reading is remarkably similar to the one Equiano stages in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> as a whole. In the process of conversion, Equiano has hailed the Musquito prince, who has been baptized and given the name George, into an affective relation with representations of suffering. Once this affect is generated, Equiano then explains the proper interpretation of the represented agony. Equiano subtly intervenes in George's embassy, but the transcultural lesson works by way of a series of perverse narratives. Equiano's interaction with George involves two masochistic scenes&#8212;a broad scenario of Christian masochism with a more specifically sexualized fantasy at its core&#8212;which establish a series of interlocking political allegories. These allegories draw parallels between the martyrdom of Protestant Englishmen, the psycho-sexual dynamics of shipboard society, and a specific moment in the history of British colonization. The allegorical dimensions of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> speak directly not only to the construction of racial categories in late eighteenth-century Britain and America, but also to the forms of complex political resistance developed by Anglo-Africans to deal with imperial domination in the Black Atlantic.<br/><br/><b>Equiano's Invisible Church</b></p></li><li><p>Linda Colley has recently reminded us of the significant role played by Foxe's <i>Book of Martyrs. . .</i> in the consolidation of British nationalism in the eighteenth century (25-8). Based on Foxe's <i>Acts and Monuments</i> of 1563 the book was revived and circulated in an aggressively patriotic fashion in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Publishers and patriots alike realized that Foxe's representation of the agonies of Protestant martyrs during the reign of Queen Mary had a certain translatability to contemporary British politics. The burning bodies could be retroactively cited as evidence not only of their resolute faith, but also of their future countrymen's Protestant destiny.What emerges from this specific imagination of community could be described as a form of masochistic nationalism&#8212;i.e. a nationalism that coheres in the pain of its annihilated members.<a href="#11">[11]</a><a name="back11"> </a></p></li><li><p>Masochistic nationalism may seem counter-intuitive to
our normative understanding of national character since
masochism carries with it the connotation of perversion,
a turning aside from truth or right, and specifically a
turning from pleasure to pain. As the quote from Bacon in
my epigraph indicates the perverse is threatening because
it deviates from the principle of hierarchy&mdash;for
Bacon, women should not govern men and slaves should not
rule over masters. Significantly, Colley argues that
Foxe's text has nationalist effects precisely because it
threatens state hierarchy. To understand this we need to
recognize that Equiano and George are poring over a book
that represents two kinds of violence. The violence in
Foxe's <i>Book of Martyrs</i> does not "go all one way."
Richard Helgerson suggests that "the persecution and
martyrdom of those whom Foxe considers members of the
true church of Christ are the book's most persistent
subject but God's punishment of persecutors makes a
strong countertheme" (255). This is important because the
second type of violence allows for a type of nationalism
predicated on the disjunction of nation and state and
hence from the extant governmental strategies of
modernity. Foxe's text contains vivid accounts of Queen
Mary's persecution of Protestant heretics accompanied by
less systematic representations of sudden violence in
which the state sanctioned persecutors are killed by
animals or natural disasters. In the first instance, "The
violence of Antichrist against the true church of Christ
and its members is carried out by willing human agents
occupying offices of great worldly power," whereas "the
violence of God [in the second instance] is either direct
or else mediated by unwitting actors" (258). As Richard
Helgerson states, "God's violence requires no
institutional order. [Beneath these two distinct forms of
punishment] lies a double and potentially divided sense
of communal identity" (258).</p></li><li><p>The way in which these two communities connect is of crucial historical importance, for "the visible church of which the king is the head should also be the local embodiment of Christ's invisible and universal church" (258). In Foxe's <i>Acts and Monuments</i>, the period immediately following Wycliffe's vernacular translation of the Bible constitutes a significant rupture between the visible and invisible church, between the state and a less tangible form of religious community. Of this latter group, Helgerson argues that</p><blockquote>Its members are readers who imagine themselves in invisible fellowship with thousands of other readers, particularly those who encounter the word in the same vernacular translation. Like the nation, this imagined community does not necessarily coincide with the state. Indeed, the state may frustrate its ambition to achieve a visible institutional embodiment of its own, may hunt down and persecute its members. But where the imagined community does not coincide with the state, it saps the state's legitimacy and the legitimacy of the social hierarchy that constitutes the power structure of the state. (266)</blockquote><p>Within the overall narrative, the accounts of the suffering of the invisible church are embodied in the burning Protestant martyrs, but these stories are counter-balanced by a chronicle history of England in which worldly and godly institutions exist in harmony. This balance allows Foxe to figure the period of Queen Mary's reign as an aberration which once corrected will allow a re-harmonization of worldly and divine governance, of state and divinely elect nation. However, the text in Equiano's hands moves in an altogether different direction.</p></li><li><p>Significantly, Equiano's primary teaching tool is not the magisterial 1563 edition of Foxe's <i>Acts and Monuments</i>, but rather a more portable abridged version of 1760 with elaborate copper plate illustrations edited by Martin Madan, a noted and controversial Wesleyan teacher, entitled <i>The Book of Martyrs: Containing an Account of the Sufferings and Death of the Protestants in the Reign of Mary the First. Illustrated with Copper Plates. Originally Written by Mr John Fox; And now Revised and Corrected with a Recommendary Preface by the Revd: Mr: Madan</i>.<a href="#12">[12]</a><a name="back12"> </a> As the title indicates the illustrations are a significant selling point, but they also fill the space left by significant elisions. Commenting on the various editions of Foxe's text, William Haller notes that eighteenth-century abridgements</p><blockquote>are a vulgarization of the original for an increasingly narrow evangelical Protestant piety. Foxe's whole account of ecclesiastical and national history, by which he sought to make his contemporaries understand what happened in Mary's reign and its bearing on the situation in which they found themselves under her successor dropped completely out. (252)</blockquote><p>Without its counter-balancing national history, the book in Equiano and George's hands establishes, in Haller's words, "a strongly oppositional identity, an identity founded on suffering and resistance and profoundly antithetical to the hierarchical order of the English state" (268). Standing in place of this historical critique, the illustrations demand closer scrutiny.</p></li><li><p>With only a few exceptions the illustrations in <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> repeat the same compositional elements (<a href="/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/madan1.html">see fig. 1</a><a name="backsee fig. 1"> </a>). Typically, the centre of the engraving is dominated by the martyr himself who is usually surrounded by a frame of fire and uttering his final testimonies of faith. That frame is itself enclosed by a crowd of onlookers who fill the background of the image. In between the crowd and the burning martyr one finds two or more executioners. In light of Kaja Silverman's analysis of masochism, the illustrations which ostensibly fascinate George conform to the structural contours of Christian masochism as described by Theodor Reik in <i>Masochism in Sex and Society</i>. Reik argues that the psychic economy of moral masochism has three primary characteristics&#8212;"exhibitionism or 'demonstrativeness,' revolutionary fervor, and 'suspense'" (Silverman 197).<a href="#13">[13]</a><a name="back13"> </a> For Reik,</p><blockquote>an external audience is a structural necessity [in Christian masochism], although it may be either earthly or heavenly. Second, the body is centrally on display, whether it is being consumed by ants or roasting over a fire. Finally, behind all these "scenes" or "exhibits" is the master tableau or group fantasy&#8212;Christ nailed to the cross, head wreathed in thorns and blood dripping from his impaled sides. (197)</blockquote>The illustrations in <i>The Book of
Martyrs</i> contain all of these elements. In <a href=
"/praxis/sexuality/oquinn/madan1detail.html">figure 1
(detail)</a>, the displayed body dominates the centre
of the image, the earthly audience surrounds the
martyr, and key elements of the composition invoke the
crucifixion&mdash;the attitude of the martyr's body and
the lance-bearing officers make the link to Christ all
too evident. The body being burned and beaten "is not
so much the body as the 'flesh,' and beyond that sin
itself, and the whole fallen world" (197). As Silverman
argues, this substitution of the flesh for the body
"pits the Christian masochist against the society in
which he or she lives, makes of that figure a rebel, or
even a revolutionary of sorts. In this particular
subspecies of moral masochism there would seem to be a
strong heterocosmic impulse&ndash;the desire to remake
the world in another image altogether, to forge a
different cultural order" (197-8). When one applies
that heterocosmic impulse to the realm of anti-slavery
activism, the slave's suffering is retained as the
instantiation not only of the eternal punishment of
those who participated in and perpetuated the slave
trade, but also of a different cultural order beyond
the reach of racial derogation and commodification. It
is this conjunction of vengeance and radical renewal
that characterizes Equiano's largely eschatological
approach to the political in this passage.<a href="
#14">[14]</a><a name="back14"></a>
</p></li><li><p>This threat to the principle of hierarchy gains some resonance in light of Paul Gilroy's recent decision in <i>The Black Atlantic</i> to consider diasporic African identity not in terms of roots but rather "as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes" (19). If following Gilroy we recognize "the image of the ship [as] a living, micro-political system in motion," then Equiano's invocation of the invisible church through the act of reading <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> with George establishes him as part of an oppositional community that is being persecuted by the ship-board minions of the English state. As the phantasmatic drama unfolds, the white sailors of the Morning Star are initially deployed as the observers in the illustrations, but, borrowing a phrase from Reik's analysis of Christian masochism, "the subject [in this case, Equiano] functions both as the victim and the victimizer, dispensing with the need for an external object. Even when the punishment seems to derive from the external world, it is in fact the result of a skillful unconscious manipulation of&#160; 'adverse incidents'" (Silverman 196).<a href="#15">[15]</a><a name="back15"> </a> If we understand Equiano's invocation of the Marian martyrs in a thoroughly political fashion, then what is emerging is a subtle bid for political autonomy in a limited field of action. As Silverman summarizes, "the sufferings and defeats of the fantasizing subject are dramatized in order to make the final victory appear all the more glorious and triumphant" (196). However, this demonstrative aspect of Equiano's text involves a second masochistic scene that is much more overtly sexualized, yet nonetheless integrally related to the reading of Foxe.</p></li><li><p>As Equiano continues his account of George's conversion, he carefully notes that George's act of praying is not prayer in the proper sense:</p><blockquote>I made such progress with this youth, especially in religion, that when I used to go to bed at different hours of the night, if he was in his bed, he would get up on purpose to go to prayer with me, without any other clothes than his shirt; and before he would eat any of his meals amongst the gentlemen in the cabin, he would first come to me and pray, <i>as he called it</i>. I was well pleased at this, and took great delight in him, and used much supplication to God for his conversion.(203)</blockquote><p>One could argue that Equiano's perspicuity regarding the status of prayer is nothing more than a sign of doctrinal rigor, but such a reading downplays the extent to which Equiano himself indicates that reading <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> with George is traversed by a complex economy of pleasure. This process of conversion is operating by way of perversion because Equiano experiences pleasure in spite of the fact that George's activities deviate from true prayer.<a href="#16">[16]</a><a name="back16"> </a> The moment when Equiano indirectly represents George's use of the word "pray" should give us pause, for there is a sense of estrangement that enters the text when Equiano attributes this naming to George&#8212;when in fact it is Equiano who is introducing George to this ritual. This mis-attribution of Equiano's own actions and desires to George are an instance of what Reik calls the manipulation of "adverse incidents." In the paragraphs below, I argue that Foxe is deployed such that Equiano becomes phantasmatically abased as the object of George's desire.</p></li><li><p>If we look closely at the scene of reading we see that Equiano emphasizes that George "was very fond of looking into [Fox's Martyrology]" (203). But this "fondness" has another register in which Equiano constructs George's desire to join him at bedtime, scantily clad and ready for "prayer." This double ascription of desire unfolds into two different masochistic trajectories.First, George's desire for the book hails him into an identificatory relation with the Christian martyrs; and second, George's "readiness for prayer" figures Equiano as the object of George's desire. The first textual hailing is aimed at George's conversion, whereas the second contextual ascription of desire is aimed at Equiano's abasement. Through this latter gesture, Equiano has moved beyond political identification with the represented martyrs in Foxe.He is now enacting his sexual degradation.The two masochistic scenarios, the persecution of the invisible church and the abasement of Equiano, are tied together by George's name. Since he has been named after the sovereign, George can figure simultaneously as the Other and as the King. In this light, George plays a perverse yet constitutive role in Equiano's oppositional relation to the ungodly "little world" of shipboard society.<a href="#17">[17]</a><a name="back17"> </a> The textual and contextual trajectories of masochism are joined by the spectral presence of the sovereign who acts as the apex or pivot in both triangular scenarios.</p></li><li><p>Significantly, these two masochistic trajectories are set in conflict with one another. If George achieves a full identification with the burning bodies represented in <i>The Book of Martyrs,</i> he accedes to his conversion and begins to imagine himself as a persecuted member of the invisible church. In other words, conversion will push George towards the same masochistic practice enacted by Equiano, and thereby deprive Equiano of his necessary tormentor.<a href="#18">[18]</a><a name="back18"> </a> It is not surprising, therefore, when Equiano tells us that the process of George's conversion is not only slow, but ultimately unsuccessful:</p><blockquote>I was in full hope of seeing daily every appearance of that change which I could wish; not knowing the devices of Satan, who had many of his emissaries to sow his tares as fast as I sowed the good seed, and pull down as fast as I built up. Thus we went on nearly four-fifths of our passage, when Satan at last got the upper hand. (203)</blockquote><p>Despite Equiano's desire for George's conversion, the fact that the whole process unfolds slowly fits a crucial element of masochistic practice. According to Reik, the moral masochist develops a series of strategies to "prolong preparatory detail and ritual at the expense of climax or consummation. . . . this implies the endless postponement of the moment at which suffering yields to reward" (Silverman 199). Silverman specifies the relationship between suspense and reward in Christian masochism by focusing on its temporal aspects:</p><blockquote>The Christian...lives his or her life in perpetual anticipation of the second coming. The figural meaning which this anticipation implants in present sufferings makes it possible for them to be savored as future pleasures, with time folding over itself in such a way as to permit that retroactivity to be already experienced now, in a moment prior to its effectivity. Such is the fundamentally perverse nature of Christian suspense and the pain it sanctifies and irradiates. . . .(200)</blockquote><p>In other words, Equiano's pleasure in George is actually displaced pleasure that will be experienced in the future when he is rewarded by God. Through George's unachieved "conversion," Equiano is able to savour his future status in a post-revolutionary state, in a post-imperial cultural order.</p></li><li><p>But Equiano's oppositionality at this stage in the narrative is contingent on his continuing relationship with George. That which separates them directly interferes with Equiano's heterocosmic fantasies. As long as Satan "sows his tares as fast as [Equiano] sows the good seed" the engagement with George seems capable of infinite extension&#8212;a kind of interminable conversion (203). In a sense, the steady pace of Satan's obstruction works to Equiano's advantage because it provides the suspense which is so crucial to the maximization of pleasure in the masochistic subject. However, when the white sailors intervene in George's conversion they instantiate a fundamental shift in Equiano's masochistic fantasies, not because they impede George's identification with the invisible church&#8212;that only suspends Equiano's reward&#8212;but because their actions physically, psychically and politically separate George and Equiano. This separation pushes Equiano's masochistic practice into more extreme manifestations whose specific details allow us to clarify the libidinal economy which undergirds his political resistance to ship-board society.<br/><br/><b>Rape and Liberation</b></p></li><li><p>The subtle and seemingly innocent account of George's attempt to pray is linked to a much more violent masochistic scenario when the white crew members of the <i>Morning Star</i> are introduced into the scene:</p><blockquote>Some of Satan's messengers, seeing this poor heathen much advanced in piety, began to ask him whether I had converted him to Christianity, laughed and made their jest at him, for which I rebuked them as much as I could; but this treatment caused the prince to halt between two opinions. Some of the true sons of Belial, who did not believe that there was any hereafter, told him never to fear the devil, for there was none existing. . . .(203-4)</blockquote><p>This passage introduces a remarkable subtext which re-orients much of the heterocosmic desire we have encountered thus far. The subtext is coded into Equiano's attack on the white sailors as "the true sons of Belial" for the appellation involves the threat of sodomitical rape. Like many of Equiano's presentations of evil, he is alluding to <i>Paradise Lost</i>:</p><blockquote>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;. . .when night<br/><br/>
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons<br/><br/>
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.<br/><br/>
Witness the streets of Sodom, and that night<br/><br/>
In Gibeah, when the hospitable door<br/><br/>
Exposed a matron to avoid worse rape.(I. 500-5)</blockquote><p>Lurking behind both Equiano's and Milton's invocation of the "sons of Belial" lies the combined story of sexual violence and national election in Judges 19-21, whose implications for not only the represented scene of reading, but also the act of reading Equiano's text are profound. The shift from <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> to the book of Judges occasions a reversal in the flow of sexual violence that subtends the emergence of a specifically national fantasy.</p></li><li><p>Adam Potkay's reading of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> persuasively argues that Equiano consistently relates presumably historical events in the Old Testament to occurrences in his own spiritual life (Potkay, "Olaudah," 681). This tropological strategy was far from unusual in Evangelical self-fashionings, but Potkay demonstrates that</p><blockquote>unlike other Puritan spiritual autobiographies, Equiano's "progress" is not <i>just</i> the tropological freeing of the soul from the symbolic Egypt of carnality; rather, his journey proceeds on a literal as well as an allegorical level. According to Equiano's telling of his life, he <i>literally</i> retraces the course of the Bible from patriarchal mores . . . to captivity in a strange land; and from deliverance to repratriation in a Beulah land of the spirit. In short, Equiano literally reenacts the basic narrative pattern of the books of Genesis and Exodus, as well as learning, by his conversion or Christian re-birth, to read Israelite history along with his own experience as an allegory of spiritual deliverance (681).<a href="#19">[19]</a><a name="back19"> </a></blockquote><p>This narrativization of personal experience in terms of Israelite history blurs the line between spiritual and political deliverance. This blurring was especially evident in the early Methodist teachings of George Whitefield. Equiano attests to having seen Whitefield speak, and as Potkay argues, "Whitefield's message of spiritual liberation from the bondage of 'these depraved natures of ours' sounded to some like a call for liberation, pure and simple" (Potkay and Burr 9).<a href="#20">[20]</a><a name="back20"> </a>As Whitefield states,</p><blockquote>Let us consider ourselves . . . as persons travelling to a long eternity; as rescued by the free grace of God, in some measure, from our natural Egyptian bondage, and marching under the conduct of our spiritual Joshua, through the wilderness of this world, to the land of our heavenly Canaan. (Quoted in Potkay and Burr, 10)</blockquote><p>Potkay's account of the tropological gestures in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> focuses primarily on how Equiano links Igbo society to the pastoral state of the Patriarchs in Genesis, and on how he figures his enslavement, auto-manumission and conversion as an enactment of the Israelites' escape from captivity in Exodus.<a href="#21">[21]</a><a name="back21"> </a>The Genesis/Exodus allegory animates much anti-slavery discourse, but Equiano strays to other sections of the Old Testament. The "sons of Belial" episode under consideration in this essay rehearses an infamous passage later in the history of the Israelites which is much more difficult to understand in terms of liberation, but which has everything to do with the consolidation of power in what can only be described as a national corpus.</p></li><li><blockquote>The prime factor in the growing national unity was the religion of Yahweh. The various national and tribal lists, and the tribal relationships themselves [that recur throughout Judges], show the Israelites were a heterogeneous group held together only by a more or less common experience and by their devotion to Yahweh." (684-5)</blockquote><p>Judges therefore is an account of national consolidation based on shared religious belief. In this context, Equiano understands his struggle with the sailors on board the <i>Morning Star</i> as a tropological rehearsal of the war between the tribes of Israel and the renegade Benjaminites that points to an allegorical unification not only of Christian believers, but also of ethnically distinct peoples in the emergent British nation.</p></li><li><p>Equiano integrates the Book of Judges into his narrative first, by declaring the sailors "true Sons of Belial," and second, by staging multiple scenes of hospitality. The sailors taunt George by telling "him never to fear the devil, for there was none existing; and if ever he came to the prince, they desired he may be sent to them" (204). This taunt obliquely rehearses Judges 19 in which the Benjaminites, figured by Milton as the sons of Belial, demand that an old man from Gibeah break the laws of hospitality and give up his Levite guest to the lustful mob. The Benjaminites "beset the house round about, beating on the door, and they said to . . . the master of the house, 'Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him'" (19:22). The threat of sodomitical rape unfolds into a horrifying narrative of sexual violence and national vengeance which ultimately recoils on Equiano's political resistance to the institutions and practices which enslaved him. However, before exploring this problematic I want to establish the strange way in which the sailors' taunt impinges on Equiano's interpellation of George into his masochistic reading of Foxe.</p></li><li><p>The sailors short circuit Equiano's masochistic practice by simply telling George that if the Devil comes to you, send him to us and we'll take care of him. In other words, the sailors are offering to protect George from precisely the martyrdom which drives identification with the invisible church. However, the sailors' taunt contains a double sign which fully entraps George. The "sons of Belial" stand as a figure for Satan in 2 Corinthians 6:15. The sailors' promise, therefore, forms a loop: if the Devil comes to you, send him to those who stand in for the Devil. In this paradoxical scenario George is shunted from the masochistic scene and hence denied access to the salvation of the invisible church which Equiano has linked to freedom from the bonds of colonial domination. George's acceptance of the sailors places him in a similar position to those who accepted the protection of the state during the reign of Queen Mary, for in Foxe's narrative they too misrecognized the power of the ungodly state. Equiano's response is perfectly apposite, for he argues that "if he and these people went to hell together, their pains would not make his any lighter" (204). By refusing to seek pleasure through pain in his lifetime, George is promised not only political subjugation in this world, but also an eternity of torment in the next.</p></li><li><p>Because Equiano's identification with the martyred figures in Fox is guaranteed by his deployment of George in the position of the King, the sailors' taunt effectively destroys Equiano's masochistic identification by depriving him of his tormentor&#8212;of his "sovereign" George. At this point, Equiano's text takes a deeply unsettling turn for the masochistic scene which revolves around the reading of <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> shifts textual loci. In an extremely subtle manner, Equiano re-stages his engagement with George using narrative structures derived from Judges 19-21. This means three things. First, that the agent of abasement shifts from George the indigene sovereign to the "Sons of Belial." Second, that Equiano's phantasmatic abasement becomes more explicitly sexualized and more overtly violent. And third, that Equiano's invocation of revenge becomes at once more pointed and more ambivalent. In order to understand this latter point we need to return to the moment of hospitality from the earlier masochistic scene and examine how it is restructured to allow the Judges narrative to become tropologically active.</p></li><li><p>At the core of Equiano's attempt to convert George one finds a moment of hospitality very similar both to that of Judges 19 and to that of the sailors' taunt, for it is George who comes to Equiano's cabin in the middle of the night full of the desire to "pray." I have already suggested that Equiano's self-construction as the object of George's desire constitutes the abasement necessary for Equiano's masochistic identification with the invisible church. But the allusion to Judges allows us to be much more specific about that abasement. In Judges 19 the master of the house offers his daughter and the Levite's wife as a way of saving his guest from sodomitical rape. When the wife is cast out, she is raped to the point of death and dumped on the threshold of the house. In response, the Levite cuts the body of his wife into twelve pieces and sends a piece to each of the tribes of Israel as a call to arms against the Benjaminites. Mieke Bal emphasizes that the text is ambiguous about the raped wife's condition upon her return. As she states, the text "refrains from stating whether the woman is dead or alive" (218). This detail is crucial because it suggests that the Levite may have killed his wife in order to elicit vengeance. As we will see this ambiguity has significant ramifications for Equiano's text.</p></li><li><p>When George comes to Equiano's door, the narrative immediately establishes a visitor-host relation in which the shelter Equiano offers is that of the invisible church posited in <i>The Book of Martyrs</i>. Significantly, both <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> and the Book of Judges emphasize that loyalty to God is necessary to success as a nation. By referring to the sailors as the "Sons of Belial," Equiano subtly figures the sailor's threat to George's conversion as the threat of sodomitical rape. The resolution of that threat, however, is extremely complex and requires that one recognize some important constitutive elements of shipboard society. First, since the ship is an all male zone, women exist only as "ideas" of alterity&#8212;their bodily difference is nowhere in evidence. What this means is that the primary corporeal encoding of difference on the ship is that of race. In the terms set forth in Judges 19, there is no sexual other to be offered to the rapacious "Sons of Belial." In light of the earlier masochistic scenario, could we not argue that Equiano re-casts himself simultaneously as the Levite and the Levite's wife in this phantasmatic scene? After all, he has already figured himself as the object of George's desire.</p></li><li><p>At this point Equiano's Christian masochism reveals itself to be integrally connected to a certain feminization. As Silverman emphasizes,</p><blockquote>the exemplary Christian masochist also seeks to remake him or herself according to the model of the suffering Christ, the very picture of earthly divestiture and loss. Insofar as such an identification implies the complete and utter negation of all phallic values, Christian masochism has radically emasculating implications, and is in its purest forms intrinsically imcompatible with pretensions of masculinity. And since its primary exemplar is a male rather than a female subject, those implications would seem impossible to ignore. <span class="style1">(198)</span></blockquote><p>What I would argue is that the hole left by the collapse of Equiano's Christian masochism is filled by newly active feminine masochism. The shift from the scene derived from Foxe to one defined by Judges 19-21 reveals not only the sexual dynamics which drive Christian martyrdom, but also the close relation between femininity and commodification.</p></li><li><p>Equiano's ability to phantasmatically align himself with both the Levite and his mutilated wife is deeply connected to Equiano's experience of slavery, for the Levite owns his wife as property in much the same way that Equiano owns himself. As Sonia Hofkosh states,</p><blockquote>in the moment that he buys his freedom, Equiano's history might also be seen to literalize the ethos of possessive individualism, exposing as it does so the double edge that defines the paradigm of the entrepeneurial subject: the self as owner depends on the principle that selves can be owned, freedom on the possibility of alienation, identity on difference. <span class="style1">(336-7)</span></blockquote><p>What this implies is that auto-manumission is structurally similar to feminine masochism. If we look closely at Equiano's account of his manumission this link between feminization and commodification is already operative. In his attempt to register the extent of his "unutterable" bliss at buying his freedom, Equiano offers a list of comparable moments of joy:</p><blockquote>Heavens, who could do justice to my feelings at this moment? Not conquering heroes themselves in the midst of triumph&#8212;Not the tender mother who has just regained her long-lost infant, and presses it to her heart . . . Not the lover, when he once more embraces his beloved mistress after she had been ravished from his arms!&#8212;All within my breast was tumult, wildness, and delirium! (136)</blockquote><p>The resting place of this sublime cascade offers a sexual allegory for the experience of slavery and self-purchase that resonates with the narrative of Judges 19. The figure compares the relationship between purchasing subject and object purchased to the relationship between male lover and his raped wife. The comparison is grounded on the double meaning of the word "ravish" for it signifies the act of rape as well as the act of violently seizing and carrying away someone or something. If the passivity inscribed in femininity can be understood as parallel to commodification, as Laura Brown suggests, then the act of commodification hollows out the subject in a fashion that makes it susceptible to feminization.<a href="#22">[22]</a><a name="back22"> </a> The double identification with the Levite and his wife, therefore, is intimately connected to the experience of double subjectivity instantiated by the commodification of bodies.<a href="#23">[23]</a><a name="back23"> </a></p></li><li><p>At one level, this feminization reverses one of the key metaphorics of abolitionist discourse&#8212;i.e. that the sexual commodification of women in marriage is akin to the commodification of Africans in the institution of slavery.<a href="#24">[24]</a><a name="back24"> </a>It reverses it by aligning femininity with what is required to extricate oneself from the institution of slavery.<a href="#25">[25]</a><a name="back25"> </a>In this particularly condensed form, Equiano's textual gesture critiques the fantasy of docility which underwrites much of the discourse of Christian abolitionism. But in the context of the Judges tropology, it also suggests that this same feminization/commodification will elicit cataclysmic acts of vengeance aimed at those who install relations of hierarchy based on gender and/or commodification. Here Equiano feminizes himself in a fashion that not only re-establishes his masochistic abasement, but also marks a crucial similarity between Foxe's, the Levite's and his own practice of writing. Peggy Kamuf has argued that the Levite's butchering of the raped wife is an act of writing, for the severed fragments of her body are used as letters calling forth vengeance.<a href="#26">[26]</a><a name="back26"> </a> Similarly, <i>Acts and Monuments</i> is a collection of writings, often by the martyrs themselves, that testifies to persecution in such a way as to demand revenge in the after life. Equiano's body of writing, in turn, can be equated with these accounts of butchering and burning, for in rendering his own life he has textualized his pain in a fashion aimed at unleashing a higher vengeance against not only the white sailors who interrupt his relation with George, but also against the state which sanctions the institution of plantation slavery. There is, however, a complex ambivalence embedded in this tropological revenge. As noted earlier, the Levite's call for vengeance via bodily dissection may rely on killing his wife. In terms of our argument thus far, this suggests that in producing <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> Equiano's call for vengeance turns on the annihilation of his enslaved self. There is a self-mutilation, a lopping off of historical experience, at the core of Equiano's textualization of bodily suffering. The resolution of this problematic requires that we attend more closely to two distinct moments where revenge enters into the account of the journey to the Musquito shore.<br/><br/><b>Things as They Are</b></p></li><li><p>The first and most visible moment of vengeance, like the vengeance of the invisible church in Foxe, suddenly enters Equiano's text as a direct action of God:</p><blockquote>one morning we had a brisk gale of wind, and, carrying too much sail, the main mast went over the side. Many people were then all about the deck, and the yard, masts and rigging, came tumbling about us, yet there was not one of us in the least hurt, although some were within a hair's breadth of being killed. . . .(204)</blockquote><p>The fact that this intervention occurs immediately following George's decision to withdraw not only from Equiano's masochistic designs, but also from shipboard society altogether, points to a significant rupture in Equiano's text. Without George, Equiano's abasement is without an agent, and therefore his connection to the invisible church reverts from one of masochistic practice to one of readerly identification. The gap between practice and representation is filled in by God's direct intervention in the social life of the ship in the shape of a "brisk gale of wind." However, in contrast to <i>Acts and Monuments</i> the violence of the gale does not kill anyone. Rather, it marks the capacity for destruction almost as if a sign of God's existence was necessary to condemn the sailors' lack of belief. This resolution of a temporary breakdown in Equiano's masochistic practice answers the worldly will to power of the sailors with power of a different order.<a href="#27">[27]</a><a name="back27"> </a> But behind and following this invocation of Godly vengeance lies a more troubling tropological reading based not on <i>The Book of Martyrs</i> but rather on the Book of Judges.</p></li><li><p>The demonstration of the providential hand of God does not negate Equiano's complex negotiation with George or with the vengeance narrative in Judges. Equiano's relation to George from this point on in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> can only be fully understood by considering the full import of revenge in the Judges narrative. The body of the Levite's dismembered wife calls forth vengeance on the Benjaminites, but it also instantiates a series of repeated sexual crimes. In the war against the Benjaminites, the tribes of Israel almost wipe out one of their constituent members. When the tribes realize that the tribe of Benjamin is on the verge of extinction, they repeat the Benjaminite's rapes on a heightened scale. First they kill the male inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead, ravish four hundred daughters of the town and present them to Benjamin so that the tribe can re-populate itself. And second, the tribes make it possible for the Benjaminites to steal and rape two hundred more women from Shiloh. Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the biblical text focuses directly on the relationship between revenge and repetition:</p><blockquote>From this outline of the legend, it is easy to see the strange turn taken by this vengeance of brother against brother. When Israel stops short of annihilating Benjamin, when the extinction of one of its members by the whole is at last understood as a form of self-mutilation, it achieves resolution by twice <i>repeating</i> Benjamin's crime. In the first repetition, the Israelites act as Benjamin's agents, stealing the virgins of Jabesh Gilead;<a href="#28">[28]</a><a name="back28"> </a> in the second repetition, the Benjaminites are authorized to steal their wives for themselves and promised immunity from retribution. Israel thus averts the threat to its unity and continuity as a whole by prescribing the crime that it had to avenge in the first place, by legislating and enacting in an exceptional manner the contrary of the law <i>as</i> the law. <span class="style1">(193)</span></blockquote><p>This repetition and reversal is resonant for <i>The Interesting Narrative</i> because Equiano performs precisely this identification with his oppressors in his final interaction with George.</p></li><li><p>Following the cessation of George's conversion, Equiano emphasizes that "[George] became ever after, during the passage, fond of being alone" (204). With George living in exile at the edge of shipboard society, no longer involved in a process of perverse conversion, Equiano's primary interest in George becomes inextricably tied to the circulation of commodities. Equiano narrates one more pedagogical scene which concretizes much of our discussion thus far:</p><blockquote>One Sunday . . . I took the Musquito prince George, to church, where he saw the sacrament administered. When we came out we saw all kinds of people, almost from the church door for the space of half a mile down to the water-side, buying and selling all kinds of commodities: and these acts afforded me great matter of exhortation to this youth, who was much astonished. Our vessel being ready to sail for the Musquito Shore, I went with the Doctor on board a Guinea-man, to purchase some slaves . . . and I chose them all of my own countrymen some of whom came from Lybia. (204-5)</blockquote><p>Before analyzing Equiano's exhortations on the marketplace, it is important to recognize that Equiano completes the tropological relation to Judges 19-21 by entering into the slave trade. With Equiano's masochistic strategies in abeyance, he shifts from object of abasement to subject of punishment, from bonded chattle to bondsman. His capacity for this kind of transition is as Susan Marren has argued the defining quality of his specific historical situation.On the face of it this shift appears to be a reversal in political strategy for Equiano, but I would like to suggest otherwise. The earlier negotiation with George was aimed at eliciting vengeance for Equiano's commodification. The new strategy is aimed less at compensatory violence than it is at generating a re-constituted social body. The radical gesture embedded in Equiano's Christian masochist deployment of the Judges allegory is his suggestion that these seemingly opposed strategies&#8212;the calling forth of God's vengeance on those who enslaved him, and his purchasing of slaves like himself&#8212;are in fact politically continuous. What Kamuf says of Judges is equally applicable to this segment of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>:</p><blockquote>The Levite's avengers, after punishing Benjamin, find themselves forced to identify with the criminals they have punished and to refuse any demand for vengeance....The solution requires, in other words, that the victim&#8212;or the victim's representatives&#8212;exchange places with the victimizer, and that the new 'crimes' be exceptionally exempted from any right to vengeance. <span class="style1">(193-4)</span></blockquote><p>This obviation of vengeance in Judges is prompted by a sudden recognition that the entire narrative constitutes a self-mutilation which threatens the unity and continuity of the tribes of Israel. Taking the tropology to its conclusion therefore suggests that Equiano's actions not only bring his self-mutilation to close, but do so in order to effect a corresponding national consolidation based on Christian belief and capitalist expansion that surfaces more explicitly elsewhere in the narrative in his advocacy of the Sierra Leone project.<a href="#29">[29]</a><a name="back29"> </a></p></li><li><p>If we return to Equiano's mediation between the church and the marketplace, we find that his temporary reticence at the outset of this episode regarding the corrupt deployment of George's anti-slavery position for ends defined by the Albera Poyer scheme breaks down when he attempts to give George a double lesson in protestant election and capitalist exchange.<a href="#30">[30]</a><a name="back30"> </a> These two moments of exchange&#8212;the sacrifice of Christ's body and the purchasing of slaves&#8212; buttressed against one another, are not only the suture point of everything we have seen thus far, but also the textual moment when the historical nature of George's activities for the Albera Poyer project impinge on Equiano's narrative. In making the anti-slavery arguments needed to impeach Hodgson, George furthers the interests of his family as participants in the sale of land, but it is precisely this move that will guarantee his family's disappropriation and potential enslavement at the moment of future colonization. George is caught in a loop, for his arguments against the commodification of natives in the region facilitate the commodification of native land. I would argue that Equiano casts his critique of this complicitous loop within the discussion of the sailors' taunt, for that taunt offers temporary protection in this world that opens onto eternal damnation in the next. The sailors, like the members of the Albera Poyer project, deploy George in a scheme that he does not understand. What is remarkable about this encrypted critique of George's relation to the "selfish English traders" is the degree to which Equiano replicates George's "error." From the site of commodity exchange Equiano turns and specifically purchases Africans like himself. If George and his family have sold out for short term gains in the scene of colonial conflict, then Equiano is attempting to generate a reconstituted social body&#8212;a kind of human portfolio, which will accede to its full surplus value in the longest term imaginable&#8212;eternity.</p></li><li><p>I would like to close by considering this entry into the slave trade in the terms of the masochistic fantasies which drive this portion of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>. If we read Equiano's representation of ship-board events as an allegory for George's involvement with the project, then George's acceptance of the sailors' deceptive offer registers his status as an unwitting tool of the Albera Poyer scheme. George is deceived by the sailors because, unlike Equiano, he does not yet read like a member of the invisible church. Similarly, he is deceived by the English planters because he has not yet internalized the workings of capital and specifically the logic of the commodity. As Robert Naylor argues, it is the non-comprehension of property in the Western sense that allows George and his family to become tools in a scheme that eventually will disappropriate them. In this light, Equiano's attempts to convert George focus on this double miscomprehension. Just as George does not understand prayer in a conventional sense, neither does he comprehend the theological economy in which he is being manipulated. The sailors, like the Albera Poyer project, manage to disable George's oppositional impulses by concealing the fact that they are his worst enemies. The exchange they are offering will gaurantee his damnation and the servitude of his people. It is not surprising therefore that Equiano's exhortations should pass from the church to the marketplace, for George needs a lesson in commodification no less than in protestant election.</p></li><li><p>But how does Equiano's role in purchasing Africans like himself fit into such a lesson? As mentioned above, the Musquito were directly engaged in the enslavement of their tribal enemies. In contrast, Equiano emphasizes that he explicitly goes about enslaving those most like himself. It is a rare assertion of racial community in Equiano's text, one which he highlights with a footnote that identifies himself with the biblical followers of "Apher...who were called Africans" (293). Could it be that in light of his failure with George he is now building a community of martyrs more like himself than the Marian martyrs? If we are willing to think through this possibility in light of Equiano's religious resistance to the ship-state, then I think what emerges from this encounter with the Musquito prince is a politics based not on freedom, but on slavery&#8212;a politics from the ground of the commodity, rather than the subject of capitalist exchange. The apocalyptic politics that Equiano advocates operates through the body of the commodified being. Equiano signals as much when he states at the outset that his purpose is to bring "some poor sinner to my well-beloved master, Jesus Christ" (202). This apparent acceptance of abasement, of commodification, of pain and persecution is predicated on a future act of vengeance which will establish Equiano and those racially like him as the exclusive property of God. What remains is the harsh judgement of unlegitimated and unsublimated complicity, for George is ultimately not granted access to such an imagined community in Equiano's narrative.</p></li><li><p>George is consigned to textual oblivion when the text shifts its attention from the social dynamics of ship-board society to the economic problems associated with plantation management. The transition from sea to land marks a crucial discursive transition in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>. The intense presentation of affective relations between Equiano and George gives way to the conventional Enlightenment description of life among a generalized category of native Indians. This discursive shift enacts a textual repression in which physical and quasi-anthropological observations are used to regulate the power of emotion elicited by rememorative passages that are too volatile to handle. If we understand the elimination of George in this way then it is difficult not to read the ensuing interactions with the Musquito population as revisions of the political entanglements of ship-board life.</p></li><li><p>As Equiano, Dr. Irving and their cohort establish a plantation in the Black River region, the indigenous population become fundamental props in fantasies of community consolidation that eerily continue the Judges allegory. In the realm of plantation society, Equiano constructs himself as the locus of almost omnipotent power. At one level, this consolidation is a fundamental premise of the quasi-ethnographic gaze which now mediates all of Equiano's observations on the Musquito and the Woolwaw. But his descriptive authority is superseded by two remarkable demonstrations of power that we tend to associate with the dominant fantasies of white supremacy, whether exercised in the realm of plantation slavery or the history of European imperial expansion. After describing the Indians' simplicity, Equiano recounts the failure of Dr. Irving to mediate between the "Governor"&#8212;again, the descriptor transplants notions of English governance to a context where governance means another thing entirely&#8212;and one of the local Chiefs who ensure the economic stability of the Irving plantation. As the conflict deepens, the Doctor literally disappears and Equiano emerges as the representative of colonial power. The conjunction of Equiano's expressed desires at this moment in the text should give any reader pause:</p><blockquote>I was so enraged with the governor, that I could have wished to have seen him tied fast to a tree, and flogged for his behaviour; but I had not people enough to cope with his party. I therefore thought of a strategem to appease the riot. Recollecting a passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where, on some occasion he frightened them, by telling them of certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the same expedient, and it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations.(208)</blockquote><p>We have already seen Equiano buying slaves, but here we find him overcome with the master's desire to beat the subaltern not simply for reasons of exemplarity, but for reasons directly related to maintaining the easy flow of commodities between the settlers and the neighbouring native populations. In light of our earlier discussion, it is far too reductive to suggest that Equiano has simply been seduced by the two-fold power of capital and imperial expansion, or that he is simply identifying with his former oppressors. In terms of the Judges allegory, Equiano exchanges places with the victimizer to enact the contrary of the law as the law. And he is doing so in part because the masochistic nationalism which characterized his ship-board praxis has transformed into a form of national imagination grounded not on heterocosmic fantasies, but rather on fantasies of immanent plenitude. The desire to avenge the horrors of slavery by remaking the world in an altogether different image is replaced by a phantasmatic accession to absolute sovereignty. Like the sudden shift in Judges from assailing the Benjaminites to folding them into a fantasy of national similitude, Equiano's practice shifts from one of self-mutilation to a performance of imperial self-consolidation.</p></li><li><p>Equiano himself emphasizes that his desires and actions in this scene of colonial conflict are strategic, but he is forced to choose between two related strategies. The first is a primary tactic in subordinating fractious slaves in the plantation economy. Equiano certainly witnessed and may have experienced precisely this deployment of bodily pain for the management of slave populations, yet he decides against this method of violent subordination in spite of his desire for its enactment. The second strategy is drawn from the history of imperial expansion and constitutes a form of symbolic or cultural violence that does not, in the first instance, have recourse to bodily pain. It has instead recourse to books.</p></li><li><p>The resonant detail for our discussion is that Equiano ends the dispute by simply using a bible as a visual icon of power:</p><blockquote>When I had formed my determination, I went in the midst of them, and taking hold of the governor, I pointed up to the heavens. I menaced him and the rest: I told them God lived there, and that he was angry with them, and they must not quarrel so; that they were all brothers, and if they did not leave off, and go away quietly, I would take the book (pointing to the bible), read, and <i>tell</i> God to make them dead. This was something like magic. The clamour immediately ceased . . . after which they went away peaceably. (208)</blockquote><p>The definition of reading has substantially transformed since the exchange with George over Foxe's <i>Book of Martyrs</i>. Instead of teaching letters and words to his indigenous companion, Equiano opts for a kind of theatrical practice learned ostensibly from accounts of Columbus's voyages, but perhaps equally derived from Equiano's own childhood understanding of the talking book.<a href="#31">[31]</a><a name="back31"> </a> Perhaps this is why Equiano no longer talks about being "an instrument under God, of bringing some poor sinner to my well-beloved master, Jesus Christ," but focuses instead on his apparently magical ability to direct God's actions through successfully talking to the bible. Unlike Equiano's childhood attempts to talk to books, this particular scene is not one of alienation, nor is it one of heterocosmic desire. Instead the bible acts unequivocally as the disciplinary tool of colonial domination. The masochistic praxis attendant upon the earlier engagement with both the text and the illustrations of Foxe's <i>Book of Martyrs</i> is here occluded by Equiano's phallic deployment of the bible as a prop in colonial performance. The experiment in masochistic nationalism on board the <i>Morning Star</i> has transformed into a phantasmatic consolidation whose force is not that of narrative but rather of visual signification. Significantly, Equiano's gesture is not grounded on territorial claims&#8212;the English have yet to colonize the region&#8212;but rather on a phantasmatic form of Christian territoriality which traverses most late eighteenth-century fantasies of nationhood.</p></li><li><p>However, the resilience of Equiano's earlier perverse strategies is evident in his final account of social exchange between the Musquito and the settlers. As Equiano progressively accedes to positions of colonial power, the question of sexual exchange between indigenous and settler peoples, which formerly defined his masochistic nationalism, becomes a site of intense anxiety. The anxiety is registered in two different ways in the following description of a grand feast or <i>drykbot</i>:</p><blockquote>The mirth had begun before we came; and they were dancing with music: and the musical instruments were nearly the same as those of any other sable people; but, as I thought, much less melodious than any other nation I ever knew. They had many curious gestures in dancing, and a variety of motions and postures of their bodies, which to me were in no wise attracting. The males danced by themselves, and the females also by themselves, as with us. The Doctor shewed his people the example, by immediately joining the women's party, though not by their choice. On perceiving the women disgusted, he joined the males. At night there were great illuminations, by setting fire to many pine-trees, while the drykbot went round merrily by calabashes or gourds. . . .(209)</blockquote><p>This curious passage is worthy of much discussion in part because it seems to refute point by point the sexual overtones of the ship-board encounter with George. Equiano asserts explicitly, in a remarkably distant voice, that he finds none of the native dancers desirable, and then seems to evaporate at precisely the moment that Dr. Irving, in a gesture of exemplarity, enters the realm of sexual exchange. Equiano carefully marks both his own repulsion from the bodies of the Musquito before him, and indicates that the Musquito women share a similar "disgust" with Dr. Irving's contravention of supposed ethnic and racial barriers. However, through the assertion of his own repulsion, Equiano partakes of the Musquito women's rejection of interracial sexual practices.<a href="#32">[32]</a><a name="back32"> </a> Equiano's earlier self-feminizations are subtly rehearsed in this identification with the women who reject Dr. Irving's attempt "to shew his people the example." The fact that Irving has to lead his people into relation with the indigenous women can be read as a tacit assertion of the ethnocentric fear of miscegenation among his white crew. But such a reading ignores the fact that interracial sexual relations were fundamental to both colonial encounter and the plantation economy&#8212;and it neglects the degree to which Irving's action both asserts and undercuts the naturalness of heterosexual desire, as does Irving's subsequent shift from the women's group to the men's. It is this latter event which prompts a sudden turning away in the discourse from descriptions of relations between native and settler people to less affect-generating descriptions of the physical environment. It would seem that object choice for Equiano&#8212;whether considered in terms of gender or ethnicity or both&#8212;is by this point a discursively volatile problematic. The sudden jump away from the intersubjective altogether may be necessary for Equiano to contain the earlier heterocosmic desires and to finally assert that "this merry-making at last ended without the least discord in any person in the company, although it was made up of different nations and complexions" (210).</p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><h4>Works Cited</h4><p class="indent">Abelove, Henry. <i>The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists</i>. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992.</p><p class="indent">Andrews, William. <i>To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865</i>. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986.</p><p class="indent">Aravamudan, Srinivas. <i>Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804</i>. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.</p><p class="indent">Bal, Mieke. "A Body of Writing: Judges 19." <i>The Feminist Companion to the Bible</i>. Vol. 4. Ed. Athalya Brenner.&#160;Sheffield: Sheffield Acacemic Press, 1993.</p><p class="indent">Berlant, Lauren. <i>The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship</i>. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997.</p><p class="indent">Brown, Laura. <i>The Ends of Empire</i>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.</p><p class="indent">Burke, Edmund. <i>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful</i>. Ed. Adam Phillips. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.</p><p class="indent">Carretta, Vincent. "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity." <i>Slavery and Abolition</i> 20.3 (1999): 96-105.</p><p class="indent">Coleman, Deirdre. "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790's." <i>ELH</i> 61 (1994): 341-62.</p><p class="indent">Colley, Linda. <i>Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837</i>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.</p><p class="indent">Cvetkovich, Ann. <i>Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism</i>. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992.</p><p class="indent">Deleuze, Gilles. <i>Coldness and Cruelty</i>.&#160;New York: Zone Press, 1989.</p><p class="indent">Equiano, Olaudah. <i>The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings</i>. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penquin, 1995.</p><p class="indent">Ferguson, Moira. <i>Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1838</i>. New York: Routledge, 1992.</p><p class="indent">Fichtelberg, Joseph. "Word between Worlds: The Economy of Equiano's <i>Narrative</i>" <i>American Literary History</i> 5.3 (1993): 459-80.</p><p class="indent">Foucault, Michel. <i>Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll&#232;ge de France, 1975-76</i>. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.</p><p class="indent">Gates, Henry Louis. <i>The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.</p><p class="indent">Gilroy, Paul. <i>The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</i>.&#160; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.</p><p class="indent">Haller, William. <i>Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation</i>. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.</p><p class="indent">Halperin, David M. <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002.</p><p class="indent">Helgerson, Richard. <i>Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England</i>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.</p><p class="indent">Hofkosh, Sonia. "Tradition and <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>: Capitalism, Abolition, and the Romantic Individual." <i>Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</i>. Eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1996.</p><p class="indent"><i>The Interpreter's Bible.</i> Ed. George Arthur Buttrick. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951-57 (v. 1, 1952).</p><p class="indent">Kamuf, Peggy. "Author of a Crime." <i>The Feminist Companion to the Bible</i>. Vol. 4. Ed. Athalya Brenner. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.</p><p class="indent">Madan, Martin. <i>Thelyphtora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, in its Causes, Effects, preventions, and Remedy; Considered on the Basis of Divine Law: Under the following heads, viz. Marriage, Whoredom and Fornication, Adultery, Polygamy, Divorce</i>. London: J. Dodsley, 1780.</p><p class="indent">Marren, Susan. "Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah Equiano's Autobiography" <i>PMLA</i> 108.1 Jan (1993): 94-105.</p><p class="indent">Mellor, Ann K. "'Am I Not A Woman, and a Sister': Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender." <i>Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</i>. Eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.</p><p class="indent">Myers, Jacob M. "Introduction to the Book of Judges." <i>The Interpreter's Bible</i>. Vol. 2. Ed. George Arthur Buttrick. New York: Abingdon Press, 1953.</p><p class="indent">Naylor, Robert. <i>Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras, 1600-1914</i>. London: Associated University Press, 1989.</p><p class="indent">Nussbaum, Felicity. <i>The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.</p><p class="indent">Obianuju Acholonu, Catherine. <i>The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano</i>. Owerri, Nigeria: AFA Publications, 1989.&#160;</p><p class="indent">Orban, Katalin. "Dominant and Submerged Discourses in <i>The Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa</i>." <i>African American Review</i> 27.4 (1993): 655-64.</p><p class="indent">Potkay, Adam. "History, Oratory, and God in Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>." <i>Eighteenth-Century Studies</i> 34.4 (2001): 601-14.</p><p class="indent">---. "Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography" <i>Eighteenth-Century Studies</i> 27.4 (Summer 1994): 677-92.</p><p class="indent">&#160; ---. <i>Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1668-1804</i>. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.&#160;</p><p class="indent">--- and Sandra Burr, eds. <i>Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century</i>. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.</p><p class="indent">Roach, Joseph. <i>Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance</i>. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996.</p><p class="indent">Samuels, Wilfred D. "Disguised Voice in <i>The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African</i>." <i>Black American Literature Forum</i> 19 (1985).</p><p class="indent">Silverman, Kaja. <i>Male Subjectivity at the Margins</i>. New York: Routledge, 1992.</p><p class="indent">Stoler, Ann Laura. <i>Race and the Education and Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things</i>. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995.</p><p class="indent">Thomas, Helen. <i>Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000.</p><p class="indent">Wheeler, Roxann. <i>The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture</i>. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.</p><p class="indent">Whitefield, George. "The Necessity and Benefits of Religious Society," in <i>Sermons on Important Subjects</i>. London: William Tegg, n.d. [no date].<br/><br/></p></div><div class="notesWorks"><h4>Notes</h4><p class="epigraph"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> All references to Olaudah Equiano, <i>The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings</i> will be included in the text. For an account of the success of the book and the fame of its author see Carretta ix-xxviii. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr have provided a bibliography of editions and printings of the text in <i>Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas</i>, 162-4. Sonia Hofkosh provides a summary of Equiano's political career in "Tradition and <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>: Capitalism, Abolition, and the Romantic Individual" in <i>Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</i>, 333.<br/><a href="#back1">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> For related discussions of the complex substitutions which mediate between the production of affect and political action see Ann Cvetkovich's compelling readings of the problem of exemplarity in AIDS activism and in Marx's novelistic gestures in <i>Capital</i> in <i>Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism</i>, 1-6 and 165-97 respectively.<br/><a href="#back2">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> This is from Edmund Burke's famous definition of sympathy in <i>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our idieas of the Sublime and the Beautiful</i>, 41.<br/><a href="#back3">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> In this regard, this essay obliquely engages with Ann Laura Stoler's <i>Race and the Education and Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things</i> (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995) in that it attempts to bring questions of sexuality and coloniality into constant reiteration through the reading of a single passage.<br/><a href="#back4">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> See Michel Foucault, <i>Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll&#232;ge de France, 1975-76</i>. In this regard, I concur with David M. Halperin's recent admonition in <i>How to Do the History of Homosexuality</i>, 24-47, that Foucault has been poorly served by many scholars who work in his name. This is especially evident when one recognizes that Foucault's engagement with questions of sexuality are deeply entwined with his attempt to offer a thorough account of the emergence of the middle classes that runs tangentially to Marx's account of cooperation in the first volume of <i>Capital</i>. Clearly articulated in <i>Discipline and Punish</i>, this project traveled through the analysis of sexuality and eventually culminated in the startling genealogy of biological state racism articulated in <i>Society Must Be Defended</i>. This complex historical assemblage of class stylization, sexual regulation and racial specification remains largely unexplored, and its future analysis arguably constitutes Foucault's "forgotten" legacy.<br/><a href="#back5">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> The term circum-Atlantic is derived from Joseph Roach, <i>Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance</i>, 4-5.<br/><a href="#back6">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup> Equiano's deployment of Christian discourse and his complex relationship to Methodism have been the subject of controversy in recent discussions of <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>.Adam Potkay offers an illuminating account of the secularization of Equiano's text while defending his own tropological reading of the narrative in "History, Oratory, and God in Equiano's <i>Interesting Narrative</i>." It is my implicit contention that attending to the erotic substrate of Equiano's Christianity not only allows one to develop a coherent account of the strangeness of his politics, but also allows one to recognize precisely how Equiano's practice diverges from the political desires of recent criticism.<br/><a href="#back7">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup> See for example Helen Thomas, <i>Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies</i>.<br/><a href="#back8">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup> Equiano, like most followers of Whitefield and Wesley, refers to himself as a member of the Church of England.It is important to remember Henry Abelove's persuasive account of the erotic substrate of Methodist practice in <i>The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists.<br/></i><a href="#back9">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent">.<sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup> Keeping the scheme out of the public eye was crucial for the success of the land monopoly.<br/><a href="#back10">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="11"> </a>11</sup> What I am describing here is not that distant from the notion of "traumatic nationalism" recently articulated by Lauren Berlant in <i>The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship</i>, 1-4.<br/><a href="#back11">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="12"> </a>12</sup> Martin Madan was also the author of an extremely controversial critique of The Marriage Act<i>&#8212;</i>which argued that polygamy was in accordance with Mosaic and Christian law&#8212;entitled <i>Thelyphtora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, in its Causes, Effects, preventions, and Remedy; Considered on the Basis of Divine Law: Under the following heads, viz. Marriage, Whoredom and Fornication, Adultery, Polygamy, Divorce</i>. Madan's close reading of the Bible opened him to charges of blasphemy, but his critical strategy of testing contemporary statutes and practices regarding marriage via typological readings of the Bible is not at all distinct from Equiano's own strategy of configuring his life in terms of the Old Testament. See Adam Potkay's analysis of this rhetorical strategy in "Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography."<br/><a href="#back12">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="13"> </a>13</sup> As Silverman argues, Reik's examples suggest that "his attention may be focused upon a different variety of moral masochism than that spotlighted by Freud&#8212;that his concern may ultimately be with Christian masochism, even when he is discussing more secular instances" (197).<br/><a href="#back13">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="14"> </a>14</sup>In "History. . .", Potkay argues that Equiano's rhetorical strategies are very similar to the oratorical tactics of Whitefield: "Behind all of these [gestures] lies the promise of divine vengeance.In this context, the question "might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God" signals not so much the perspective of a cultural outsider as a confirmation that the Christian universe knows no outside; it is all inclusive, and is itself the surety of eventual justice" (605).For an illuminating account of the oratorical qualities of Equiano's text see William Andrews, <i>To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865</i>.<br/><a href="#back14">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="15"> </a>15</sup> See Reik, 304.<br/><a href="#back15">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="16"> </a>16</sup> What true prayer might mean in this instance may be impossible to define. Equiano may be distinguishing George's actions from the rules for personal conduct laid out by Wesley, or he may be referring to more traditional Protestant definitions of prayer. Equiano may be referring to specific doctrinal exercises, although the context does not explicitly support this view. I would like to thank Kim Michasiw for suggesting this possiblility.<br/><a href="#back16">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="17"> </a>17</sup> Equiano refers to ships as "little worlds."<br/><a href="#back17">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="18"> </a>18</sup> For a discussion of the ambiguous role played by the masochist's tormentor see Gilles Deleuze, <i>Coldness and Cruelty</i>.<br/><a href="#back18">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="19"> </a>19</sup> Starting from Equiano's profession of similarity between the laws of the Pentateuch and the laws of Igbo society, Potkay's essay works through the progression from Genesis through Exodus in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>. Potkay's reading however trails off after Equiano's conversion for reasons that are partially articulated in Srinivas Aravamudan's critique of Potkay's reading in <i>Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1668-1804</i>, 239-46. Aravamudan suggests that Potkay's decision to focus only on the tropological leaves the question of the anagogical unaddressed, but, as Potkay has recently argued in "History. . .", 608-9, Aravamudan's reading of Equiano's Christianity is neither persuasive in itself, nor sufficient for dealing with the complex relationship between rhetorical performance and political incitement in <i>The Interesting Narrative</i>. As I hope my unraveling of the Judges allusion indicates, Equiano's deployment of the Bible cannot be contained in any straightforward fashion, for even at the tropological level the text works against itself.<br/><a href="#back19">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="20"> </a>20</sup>Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, "Introduction" <i>Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century</i>, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 9. Potkay and Burr also draw attention to an inaccuracy in Equiano's claim to have seen Whitefield, see p.9.<br/><a href="#back20">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="21"> </a>21</sup> See Potkay, "Olaudah," 682-685.<br/><a href="#back21">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="22"> </a>22</sup> See Laura Brown, <i>The Ends of Empire</i>, 85. Brown's link between femininity and commodification is succinctly stated as follows:</p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><a href="#back">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="23"> </a>23</sup> See Hofkosh, 337.<br/><a href="#back23">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="24"> </a>24</sup> See Moira Ferguson, <i>Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1838</i>, Deirdre Coleman, "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790's," and Ann K. Mellor, "Am I Not A Woman, and a Sister": Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender."<br/><a href="#back24">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="25"> </a>25</sup> Felicity Nussbaum broaches the question of Equiano's gender identity in <i>The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>, 191-206, but like much of the prior criticism regarding Equiano's unstable masculinity overlooks the possibility of strategic feminization as a figural and textual strategy of violent revenge. Nussbaum, like numerous other critics, assumes a disconnection between feminization and violent revenge that renders Equiano's deployment of Judges all but unreadable. Equiano's "femininity" has been a topic of some concern in Wilfred D. Samuels "Disguised Voice in <i>The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African</i>," and in Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, <i>The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano</i>. However, much of this discussion not only diverges from Equiano's text, but also fails to adequately historicize gender and sexuality in both 18th century British and Igbo society. Katalin Orban raises a related question in "Dominant and Submerged Discourses in <i>The Life of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa)</i>."Attempts to excavate the roots of Equiano's femininity from his Igbo past may have been rendered moot by Vincent Carretta's recent suggestion that Equiano was a native of South Carolina in "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity." The problems posed by Equiano's gender identity demonstrates the complexity of thinking historically about sexuality in a trans-cultural context.<br/><a href="#back25">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="26"> </a>26</sup> See Peggy Kamuf, "Author of a Crime" in <i>The Feminist Companion to the Bible</i>, 20.<br/><a href="#back26">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="27"> </a>27</sup> The invocation of God's power is simply the corollary declaration of the oppositional relation between the invisible church and the visible state previously exercised through the masochistic scene.<br/><a href="#back27">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="28"> </a>28</sup> Mieke Bal, in "A Body of Writing: Judges 19" in <i>The Feminist Companion to the Bible</i>, objects to the use of virgin in this instance in a fashion that underlines precarious task of paraphrasing or troping this passage in Judges (217).<br/><a href="#back28">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="29"> </a>29</sup> The most important element in Equiano's romance with capital is his advocation for the Sierra Leone company.For an illuminating discussion of his relation to the project see Srinivas Aravamudan, <i>Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804, 234-88.<br/></i><a href="#back29">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="30"> </a>30</sup> In "Word between Worlds: The Economy of Equiano's Narrative," Joseph Fichtelberg has persuasively argued that Equiano's piety and his economic fantasies are thoroughly intertwined.<br/><a href="#back30">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="31"> </a>31</sup> Aravamudan emphasizes the generic quality of this recourse to the bible (271). See Henry Louis Gates, "The Trope of the Talking Book," in <i>The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism</i>, for the canonical reading of the talking books episode.<br/><a href="#back31">Back</a></p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"> </p><p style="text-align: left" class="indent"><sup><a name="32"> </a>32</sup> At one level, this would seem to be at odds with Equiano's advocacy of intermarriage in an article published in <i>The Public Advertiser</i> in 1788. However, Equiano's refutation of James Tobin's pro-slavery writings focuses exclusively on ameliorating the exploitation of black women by white men in the plantation economy and thus stabilizes the scene of sexual exchange by eliminating not only other ethnicities, but also non-heterosexual sexual practices and identities. The problem posed by the drykbot is that its intensely hybrid form of sociability does not allow for easy discursive stabilization and thus Equiano's text opts for temporary containment. For a discussion of Equiano's writing on intermarriage see Roxann Wheeler, <i>The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture</i>, 284-5.<br/><a href="#back32">Back</a><br/><br/></p></div></div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/oquinn-daniel-j">O&amp;#039;Quinn, Daniel J.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/sexuality" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sexuality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1792" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sodomy</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/olaudah-equiano" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Olaudah Equiano</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anti-slavery</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2020" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">masochism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/title/foxs-book-martyrs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Fox&#039;s Book of Martyrs</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2022" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The Book of Judges</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2023" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">perversion</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-fox" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Fox</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/george-whitefield" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Whitefield</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/sonia-hofkosh-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sonia Hofkosh</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/theodor-reik" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Theodor Reik</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/adam-potkay-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Adam Potkay</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charles-irving" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Irving</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/robert-naylor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Naylor</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-hodgson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Hodgson</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/olaudah-equiano" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Olaudah Equiano</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-haller" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Haller</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jesus" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jesus</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/kaja-silverman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kaja Silverman</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/nicaragua" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nicaragua</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/jamaica" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamaica</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/israel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Israel</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/central-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Central America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/musquito-coast" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Musquito coast</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/natural-feature/black-river" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Black River</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:05:35 +0000rc-admin14959 at http://www.rc.umd.eduHeringman, "'Manlius to Peter Pindar': Satire, Patriotism, and Masculinity in the 1790s"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/patriotism/heringman/heringman_essay.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/patriotism/index.html">Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Romanticism and Patriotism:<br />
Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">"Manlius to Peter Pindar": Satire,
Patriotism, and<br />
Masculinity in the 1790s</h3>
<h4 align="center">Noah Heringman, University of
Missouri-Columbia</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<ol>
<li>
<p>In the summer of 2004, spokesmen for the Bush
administration did not refer to Michael Moore as "a
bloated mass, a gross, blood-bolter&rsquo;d clod" who
"spunge[d] on dirty whores for dirty bread" (Gifford
lines 67, 124). They did not exactly call him a
"scourge of society . . . polluted with vanity,
cowardice, and avarice" (Albion 12), nor did they mask
their ad hominem attacks behind patriotic pseudonyms
such as "Manlius" or "Albion." Moore&rsquo;s detractors
in the White House concealed neither their identities
nor their actual ignorance of his work, including the
new film that provoked them, <em>Fahrenheit 9/11</em>.
Patriotic pseudonyms did play a significant role in
conservative attacks on Moore&rsquo;s Georgian
predecessor John Wolcot, alias Peter Pindar
(1738-1819), but his detractors nonetheless tended to
ground their charges on a thorough knowledge of his
popular satires. From at least 1787 until well after
1800, these numerous polemicists, sometimes employed
directly by the government, attacked Wolcot&rsquo;s
patriotism by questioning his manhood. Like
Moore&rsquo;s work in some ways, Wolcot&rsquo;s
anti-monarchical satire brought more outrageous and yet
more accurate criticism of the government before a
larger public than any comparable work. His
critics&rsquo; retaliation could be compared to such
recent works as <em>Michael Moore Hates America</em>
and <em>Michael Moore is a Big, Fat, Stupid White
Man</em>. As their epithets attest, Wolcot&rsquo;s
opponents similarly emphasized his corpulent body and
his deviant masculinity, made more dangerous by its
challenge to a militarized culture and the exalted
masculinity of a wartime leader. Moore&rsquo;s claim to
be a patriot is especially offensive to the right, and
Wolcot too presented himself as a member of the loyal
opposition; but the term "patriotism" (or
"unpatriotic") is more rarely applied to Wolcot because
its sense has shifted along with the composition of the
body politic.<a href=
"#note1">[1]</a>
What we might call unpatriotic in Wolcot&rsquo;s satire
appeared instead as libel, sedition, and blasphemy,
especially when he targeted the royal body of George
III.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Wolcot, as Pindar, politicized the King&rsquo;s
corporeal masculinity and thereby invited attack on his
own. Clearly relishing the verbal combat, Wolcot set
forth a grossly embodied masculinity as a condition of
the genuine political agency he opposed to the
bloodless, moralistic loyalism inculcated under the
government of William Pitt. The difference between
these two opposing forms of masculine patriotism, I
will argue, corresponds to the rift between the
king&rsquo;s two bodies exploited by Wolcot&rsquo;s
satires. At the same time, Wolcot&rsquo;s poetry
promoted a conflict that allowed both sides to taste
the libidinal pleasures of patriotic struggle: he
became the focal point of scatological and sodomitic
fantasies as well as attempts to politicize sexual
morality. Wolcot&rsquo;s many satirical antagonists
used his own ribald persona more or less skillfully
against him to unman or infantilize the robust social
critic implied as the author of his satires. William
Gifford of the <em>Anti-Jacobin Review</em> dismissed
the "filthy drivel of this impotent dotard" (11) as
sexual wish-fulfillment, adding more than twenty years
to Wolcot&rsquo;s real age in an elaborate attack in
verse. "Manlius," in the pages of the
<em>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em>, took Wolcot to
task as "foremost among the enemies of Royalty" and
condemned the unmanly sentiments of a poet who could
lampoon a monarch recently recovered from madness
(1044). Ironically, however, Wolcot himself continually
upbraided George for failures of manly sentiment:
sometimes selling thousands of copies a day,
Wolcot&rsquo;s lampoons gleefully ridiculed the
King&rsquo;s stutter, his vulgar social and natural
curiosity, his taste for castrati, his failings as a
father, and his politically obnoxious avarice.<a href=
"#note2">[2]</a>
In a similar vein, Wolcot dismissed the natural history
of George&rsquo;s favorite Sir Joseph Banks as "well
suited to the idle hour of some old maid," not fit for
"men who labour . . . with a Titan mind" for the
benefit of humanity (<em>Works</em> 235).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The political satire of Wolcot and his critics
dramatizes the political charge of sexual deviance.
Today&rsquo;s Georgians, like the
<em>Anti-Jacobin</em>, seem to have claimed "the
manlier virtues, such as nerv&rsquo;d / Our
fathers&rsquo; breasts" for themselves (Canning 326).
In this view, the satirist&rsquo;s vitiated manhood is
the unmistakable symptom of his treasonous intent. At
the same time, the success of Wolcot&rsquo;s sharp
attacks on the King and the Pitt government depended in
no small part on his own ability to construct highly
politicized definitions of masculinity. For both sides,
then, sexual deviance is political deviance. Though
currently the right seems to control this equation, the
right-wing bloggers&rsquo; obscene conflations of
Moore&rsquo;s personal and political manhood, his body
and his work, betray a complex and unstable ideological
foundation informed by the politics of the 1790s. I
won&rsquo;t begin to speculate about the
bloggers&rsquo; frequent recourse to homophobic
epithets and images in their attacks on Moore, but the
charge of sodomy also curiously frames Wolcot&rsquo;s
career in the prose and verse of his detractors. In
March 1789 the <em>Times</em> reported, in brief,
oblique installments, that a scullion from the royal
kitchens had been caught in flagrante delicto with
Peter Pindar in the Birdcage Walk. This
charge&mdash;probably because it was spurious&mdash;lay
dormant for eleven years until Gifford introduced it in
the prose apparatus to his Epistle to Peter Pindar.
Gifford&rsquo;s attack is also the most vehement and
elaborate of the dozens I have read, and for some
readers it sank Wolcot&rsquo;s reputation for good.
Previous critics had tended to concentrate on other
vices&mdash;Peter&rsquo;s obesity, his promiscuity
and/or impotence, drunkenness, irreverence, and
propensity to libel and falsehood. Gifford&rsquo;s
willingness to air eleven-year-old dirty laundry may
reflect a new level of investment in professional
literary authority of the kind that Michael Gamer
describes in his recent reading of Gifford&rsquo;s
<em>Baviad</em>: "For Gifford . . . [the publisher
John] Bell&rsquo;s attempts to repackage Della Cruscan
verse into high cultural artifacts amounted to multiple
usurpations of literary authority" (48). Wolcot&rsquo;s
commercial success in the arena of political satire may
well have been similarly threatening. In its virulence
Gifford&rsquo;s attack on Wolcot also consolidates a
decade&rsquo;s worth of increasing intolerance, of ever
tighter strictures on patriotism and masculinity.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Wolcot began his career with a confident control of
masculinity enabled by his robust opposition
patriotism, a mode the 1790s did much to circumscribe.
From 1782-87 he produced much of his best-known work:
four sets of annual odes to the Royal Academicians, two
satires on Boswell&rsquo;s <em>Life of Johnson</em>,
and his first satires on George III, including the
first two cantos of his mock-epic, <em>The
Lousiad</em>.<a href=
"#note3">[3]</a>
Wolcot&rsquo;s masculinity in these works is prominent,
yet hard to classify. Persistent attempts to dismiss
him as a hireling of the Foxite Whigs were confounded
by his openly declared Toryism and eventually by his
rebukes to Thomas Paine and occasional anti-Gallic
fervor. Neither the patriarchal model of chivalric
manhood as retailed to the middle classes by Edmund
Burke, nor the fraternal, unstable identity derived
from the man of feeling&mdash;two possibilities
outlined by Tim Fulford&mdash;seem to fit Wolcot,
though at times he seems close to the virile populism
of William Cobbett, identified by Fulford as the source
of the anxiety that drove Coleridge back to Burke in
later years (ch. 5). In his <em>Epistle to James
Boswell</em>, Wolcot skewers Boswell for retailing
biographical trivialities, a sign of puerile
hero-worship as well as the cognitive myopia that
Wolcot is quick to condemn in many of his victims,
including the king and Joseph Banks. In the more
carnivalesque <em>Bozzy and Piozzi, a Town
Eclogue</em>, Boswell is simply a drunk and a puppy,
and Wolcot identifies more explicitly with the
impatient paternal authority of Johnson himself. The
same manly Johnsonian independence enables him, as an
art critic, to puncture the stylistic mannerisms of
each year&rsquo;s Royal Academy pictures, yet this
attitude is fractured by his own puppyish admiration of
Joshua Reynolds, who is always exempted from these
criticisms. In his political poetry Wolcot&rsquo;s
eccentric masculinity takes on the important
connotation of non-partisanship: "Know, I&rsquo;ve not
caught the itch of party sin. / To Fox, or Pitt, I
never did belong" (<em>Works</em> 278), he instructs
Thomas Warton in <em>Ode upon Ode</em> (1787).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Wolcot&rsquo;s propensity to "lose the monarch in
the man," as one poetical adversary put it ("The Two
Pindars"), began with <em>The Lousiad</em>, in which
the King declares war on his entire kitchen staff,
ordering their heads shaved in his presence after he
finds a louse on his plate. Wolcot brilliantly
politicizes the model he inherits from Alexander Pope
by framing the epic battle in a way that underscores
the king&rsquo;s human needs: the resentful cooks, in a
colloquy that recalls Milton&rsquo;s Pandemonium as
much as <em>The Rape of the Lock</em>, declare: "Yes;
let him know with all his wondrous state / His teeth,
his stomach on our wills shall wait" (<em>Works</em>
30). The angry cooks invoke John Wilkes and America to
politicize the King&rsquo;s human nature, but for the
narrator George&rsquo;s masculinity is equally
problematic. His uncontrollable anger over finding the
louse exacerbates his stutter, the "broken language" in
which he responds to the crisis (36), but also
illustrates the narrow vision of a king "delighted with
the world of little" (34). Even when engaging
scientifically with the natural world, George&rsquo;s
inspiration is like that of "vain Sapphos, who fancy
all Parnassus in their brain" (34)&mdash;and yet his
unwillingness to read dispatches except in the presence
of "buxom Nanny" (29) suggests a certain virility as
well. (This charge of lechery, incidentally, is one of
several soon reversed upon the satirist.) "All eye, all
ear, all mouth, all nose" (44), the king&rsquo;s
unstable, imperfectly gendered body produces the
unregulated appetites and the vulgar curiosity that
fuel the political vices of avarice and favoritism
emphasized more strongly in the topical odes of
1787-88.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The terms of the conflict over Wolcot&rsquo;s poetry
were set before the French Revolution, yet the conflict
was also intensified by the rise of English
Anti-Jacobin sentiment in the 1790s. Two bodies of
thought are thus needed to theorize the development of
Wolcot&rsquo;s satire and the critical response: the
traditional politico-theology of monarchy, on the one
hand, and the representation of revolutionary change,
on the other, particularly in terms of gender and
aesthetics. Concerted attacks on Peter Pindar in
periodical prose and pamphlet verse began soon after
the <em>Lousiad</em>, informed politically by
prerevolutionary, metaphysical loyalties and
historically by the events of the first Regency crisis,
among others. "Manlius," troubled by Wolcot&rsquo;s
failure to respect the vulnerability of a king verily
unmanned by madness, alleges that Wolcot&rsquo;s
erstwhile pupil John Opie has fittingly depicted him in
a historical painting as one of the murderers in
<em>The Assassination of James I</em> (1044).<a href=
"#note4">[4]</a>
This insinuation was not nearly as incendiary in 1788
as it would have been four years later, after the
arrest of Louis XVI, but nonetheless draws on a long
tradition of imagining violence against the royal body.
Louis Marin argues that "the body of the King is really
present in the form of his portrait" (190), and the
intensity of reaction against Wolcot suggests a strong
analogy between his verbal "portraits" and the
representations theorized by Marin. Developing the
psychoanalytic implications of Ernst
Kantorowicz&rsquo;s thesis in <em>The King&rsquo;s Two
Bodies</em>, Marin reads the portrait as "the
theologico-political theory of the royal body" (201),
according to which the king must be "seduced by his own
image" (210). Marin locates the converse of this
fetishistic masochism in "the sadism of the subject who
is fascinated by the body of the King," exemplified as
much in Wolcot as in the caricature that Marin goes on
to analyze. The caricature (a drawing by William
Makepeace Thackeray) separates the king&rsquo;s two
bodies: "it tries to make us believe that the natural
body . . . is the truth of the body of signs" (211-12).
The pleasure of the caricature is therefore like that
of "a voyeur witnessing a sexual aggression against the
King&rsquo;s body," which becomes feminized and
"mortified by an encroaching senility" (216-17). Marin
thus helps to clarify Wolcot&rsquo;s strategy and the
reaction to it: the king&rsquo;s "broken language"
aligns him with the material, the feminine, and the
human against the spiritual, masculine, and divine.
Ronald Paulson&rsquo;s summary of one stage of the
French Revolution captures one of the reasons why it
intensified the need to reclaim a divinely authorized
masculinity, a need already apparent in the strictures
of Manlius and others like him: "These are horrible,
ugly, violent, aggressive <em>women</em> . . . of the
Parisian mob who march to the royal palace and bring
back the king and queen&mdash;women who in effect
<em>are</em> the Revolution" (81).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Historical and personal factors also contributed to
Wolcot&rsquo;s refusal to fall into line, which
unsettled the increasingly polarized, militarized
landscape of the 1790s. Wolcot was past fifty in 1789,
and his avoidance of partisanship, even in these
difficult conditions, harks back to the politics of an
earlier period. His phrase "the itch of party sin"
suggests a disease transmitted by the too-close
proximity of politicians to power and seems to allude
to the clubbish elitism of Parliament first brought
into focus by John Wilkes, Wolcot&rsquo;s slightly
older contemporary, in the 1760s. Wolcot&rsquo;s own
Tory affiliation seems to have been wholly ingenuous:
he campaigned for the Tories in a local election in
1790 and gave the name <em>True Blue</em> to his
pleasure boat (Girtin 134). But while maintaining the
prescribed constitutional role of the King and Lords
Wolcot also subjects a range of exploitative state
institutions and private industries to a stringent
critique rightly identified as socialist by Grzegorz
Sinko.<a href=
"#note5">[5]</a>
Wolcot&rsquo;s non-partisan Toryism, egalitarian and
fiercely secular, thus informs his separation of the
king&rsquo;s two bodies. The incompetence of the royal
physical body, as in <em>The Lousiad</em>, becomes a
legitimate political issue, while the king&rsquo;s
divine body (or "great name") provides the poet with
cultural capital, as Peter observes in <em>Brother
Peter to Brother Tom</em>: "The world may call me liar;
but sincerely / I love him&mdash;for a partner, love
him <em>dearly</em>; / Whilst his great name is on the
<em>ferme</em>, I&rsquo;m sure / My credit with the
public is secure" (<em>Works</em> 78). At the same
time, Wolcot foregrounds the appetitive body of the
patriot, rejecting patriotic idealism: "Yes, beef shall
grace my spit, and ale shall flow, / As long as it
continues George and Co." The poet&rsquo;s corpulent
body serves as a kind of populist credential, which can
be illustrated with reference to Cobbett or Michael
Moore or even William Hone, the defiant radical
publisher who, though not corpulent himself, became a
reverent student of carnival and popular tradition in
his antiquarian work on Bartholomew Fair.
Wolcot&rsquo;s stylized Epicureanism also links him to
the carnivalesque "comic / picturesque" aesthetics that
Ronald Paulson associates with Thomas Rowlandson and
the political tradition of Wilkes and the Foxite
Whigs.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>But in the main Wolcot belongs with the grotesque
rather than the picturesque, to borrow Paulson&rsquo;s
vocabulary further. Paulson&rsquo;s account of the
grotesque helps to contextualize Wolcot in the
postrevolutionary setting in terms of gender as well as
aesthetics&mdash;whether or not one wishes to agree
categorically that "the grotesque is all in all the
dominant aesthetic mode of the period" and that hence
"the cartoonist Gillray&rsquo;s George III, John Bull,
and Louis XVI all merge into the same figure" (7).
Paulson makes a distinction between the "weak
revolutionary imagery" of Rowlandson, Charles James
Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales
(115) and the stronger images of James Gillray, a
distinction that also helps to underscore
Wolcot&rsquo;s distance (despite public misperceptions)
from that camp. In fact, although Wolcot is not cited,
Paulson&rsquo;s reading of Gillray brings out the
poet&rsquo;s influence on the younger satirist. Gillray
acknowledges Wolcot most forcefully in <em>Ancient
Music</em> (1787), an early satire on the King&rsquo;s
vulgar taste for Handel and flattery&mdash;a favorite
topic of Wolcot&rsquo;s&mdash;that draws its images and
quotes a passage from <em>Ode upon Ode</em>.<a href=
"#note6">[6]</a>
Paulson points out that the grotesque had long been
"associated with both political and artistic freedom
and creativity" (175) and gives a number of reasons for
its rise to prominence, culminating in the
revolutionary confusion of high and low, English and
French, human and animal. Paulson argues that a
"physical resemblance between the French and English
kings began to emerge" in Gillray&rsquo;s prints in the
1790s (193), a resemblance with harsh implications for
the corporeality of king and commoner alike. This
grotesque elision of difference (as I will suggest
later) helps to account for the scatological and
sodomitic references in the criticism of Wolcot. The
grotesque also conflates the king&rsquo;s two bodies in
such a way as to shift the discussion from theological
to political ground. Alluding to a whole series of
Gillray images, Paulson surveys the indiscriminate
corporeality that makes the grotesque a revolutionary
aesthetic par excellence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whether eating is excessive or the opposite, the
figures on both sides of the channel share the lowest
common denominator of regression to orality and
anality. Orality extends from cannibalism to the
peculiar diet of the royal family, to both England
and France devouring the globe, to the Jacobins
firing the bread of liberty into the mouths of other
European nations and being devoured themselves by
hungry crocodiles. The scatology that distinguished
the imagery of Burke&rsquo;s anti-Jacobin tracts
becomes in Gillray&rsquo;s cartoons the extraordinary
emphasis on both food and feces, both eating and
excreting. Scatological references extend from Pitt
as a toadstool on a royal dunghill to John
Bull&rsquo;s guts-ache and George III sitting on the
royal closestool or defecating ships onto the royal
mainland, to the Napoleon who . . . tries to pass
himself, in fact a horse turd, off as a golden
pippin. (200)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If it is true that for Gillray "kings and subjects
[become] equally alike cannibals or tyrants," the same
degree of regression would not be possible in Wolcot
for a number of reasons.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Moreover, according to other readings of Gillray,
honest John Bull is distinguished much more sharply,
and in fact defined against, a feminized French other.
The absence of such dichotomies in Wolcot may explain
why his own popular, politically ambivalent, grossly
embodied image of George III did not survive as well
through the 1790s. Paulson&rsquo;s observation that "in
consistently applied caricature there are no
&lsquo;heroes&rsquo;" (203) applies more clearly to
Wolcot than to Gillray, and helps to explain why
Wolcot&mdash;to judge from the volume of printed
discussion&mdash;was the more controversial figure. The
revolution features consistently in Gillray&rsquo;s
images, however disturbing, and there is a sense in
which the virility of his regressive figures stands
against the "women who <em>are</em> the Revolution," as
feared by Burke. But for Wolcot&mdash;partly, I think,
because of his age&mdash;the revolution is a much
smaller piece of the English "pie" (Paulson 37), and by
insisting on domestic political issues in his poems of
the mid-to-late 1790s (the tax burden, restrictions on
civil liberties, civil unrest) he appeared to his
critics to be evading the challenge posed by the enemy.
There are no heroes, then, in Wolcot, and no resolute
men to stand up to the mob of women. To make matters
worse, his pseudonym, Peter Pindar, deliberately courts
comparison with the most robustly masculinist and
hero-worshipping bard produced by the ancient world.
The revolution helped to focus the anxiety already
attached to the royal body as a result of
George&rsquo;s madness in 1788. The intensified
reaction to Wolcot suggests that once the king is no
longer unequivocally the body of the nation, there is
increased pressure on the body and the masculinity of
the individual subject. The exercise of vilifying
"Peter Pindar" (the pseudonym itself served his
critics&rsquo; rhetorical purposes) allowed
anti-Jacobin commentators to superimpose the paradigm
of two bodies on the body politic as a whole: the "two
Pindars" allegorize a division between disciplined and
vulnerable bodies, true and false patriotism, manly and
unmanly sentiment. The recurring topos of
Wolcot&rsquo;s prostituted Muse also maintains the
connection between unmanly sentiment and abjected
femininity. Wolcot&rsquo;s mode of opposition
patriotism was also circumscribed, finally, by the
infringement of civil liberties that he addressed in
poems such as <em>Liberty&rsquo;s Last Squeak</em>
(1795) and <em>1796</em>. Yet Wolcot was never
prosecuted for libel, as Gillray was, or charged with
any of the other forms of sedition so freely imputed to
dissidents in the mid-1790s.<a href=
"#note7">[7]</a>
It may have helped that Wolcot was prepared: he
anticipated being silenced by the state in various
satires as early as 1787. The conceit of
<em>Peter&rsquo;s Pension</em>, published in 1788,
briefly became an uncomfortable reality in 1795 when he
accepted an advance on a pension from the Treasury
(Girtin 172-78); but Wolcot had second thoughts and
returned the money before writing anything for the
government&mdash;thus bearing out the assertion of the
poem: "No, Sir, I cannot be your humble hack; / I fear
your majesty would break my back" (<em>Works</em>
266).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>At this pre-revolutionary stage even Wolcot&rsquo;s
respectable readers remonstrated fairly gently. In 1787
the <em>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em>, thus far an
eager, if somewhat ironic supporter of Wolcot&rsquo;s
poetry, earnestly took issue with insinuations
detrimental to George&rsquo;s fatherly affection in
<em>The Progress of Curiosity, or A Royal Visit to
Whitbread&rsquo;s Brewery</em>. Having lampooned the
king&rsquo;s "<em>minute</em> curiosity" and "profound
questions" concerning the art of brewing with
characteristic verve, Wolcot goes on to suggest that
George showed too little sensibility at the illness of
his son: "Sing how a monarch, when his son was dying, /
His gracious eyes and ears was edifying, / By abbey
company and kettle drum" (<em>Works</em> 18). (This is
one of several satires in which Wolcot develops the
theme taken up by Gillray in <em>Ancient Music</em>.)
Responding to this passage, the
<em>Gentleman&rsquo;s</em> reviewer admonishes him:
"Put thyself in the Stead of any Parent . . . and
correct thy severities" (57.620).<a href=
"#note8">[8]</a>
In a similar case the magazine passes "severe censure .
. . [on] Peter&rsquo;s unfeeling heart," turning the
tables on his charge of inadequate sensibility
(58.440). At the same time, John Nichols and his
reviewers dismissed the attacks in verse that were
beginning to appear in 1787, suggesting that "poetry is
not the most proper vehicle for exposing" Peter Pindar,
and perhaps reserving the right of censure for
themselves (57.20). Yet such poems began appearing in
the magazine as well: "The Two Pindars," which faults
Wolcot for "los[ing] the monarch in the man,"
inaugurates an unfavorable comparison that
Wolcot&rsquo;s chosen pseudonym seems to court and that
becomes a staple in attacks on him. The contribution of
"Manlius"&mdash;a pseudonym alluding to the severely
upright Roman father whose patriotism was made
exemplary by Livy and anthologized in turn by William
Enfield&rsquo;s <em>The Speaker</em> among other
schoolbooks&mdash;blames Wolcot, as I mentioned, for
failing to spare the king&rsquo;s madness and
introduces two further anti-Wolcot tropes, the
prostituted muse and the supposed resentment of
Wolcot&rsquo;s former prot&eacute;g&eacute;, the
painter John Opie. Manlius&rsquo;s discussion of Wolcot
as assassin in Opie&rsquo;s <em>Assassination of James
I</em> (as well as another painting) highlights
Wolcot&rsquo;s designs on the royal body that would
become even more contentious after the revolution.
Paulson maintains that this revolutionary contention is
always "about England; the French Revolution was only
one foreign ingredient in a pie of their own making"
(37). Wolcot, with his refusal to focus on the
revolution, well illustrates this continuity; so too
the discourse about him, from the beginning, takes the
"oedipal" and "oral-anal" forms assigned by Paulson to
revolutionary conflict itself (8), though certainly the
discourse becomes more violent in the 1790s.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>After the revolution, regressive violence
increasingly prevailed and even the issue of classical
education&mdash;initially a common idiom, even if used
for satirical combat&mdash;became more volatile. Wolcot
may have chosen Pindar as a namesake because of the
ancient Theban&rsquo;s reputation for "belong[ing] . .
. to no faction," or being above politics (Lattimore
vii)&mdash;a more acceptable stance before the war.
Later T. J. Mathias and others challenged
Wolcot&rsquo;s pretensions to classical learning and
implicitly dismissed the whole tradition of satire as
patriotic opposition. Yet Mathias feels compelled to
footnote both his allusions to the Theban Pindar to
make clear that he means Pindar and "not that
detestable writer, calling himself Peter Pindar"
(<em>Pursuits of Literature</em>, pt. 3, p. 7n.). The
anonymous "To the Soi-disant Peter Pindar" elaborates
the comparison over several stanzas, concluding:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>He</em>, true to merit, eterniz&rsquo;d the
names<br />
Of god-like heroes, in immortal strains:<br />
<em>Your</em> doggerel muse the brightest worth
defames,<br />
And fouls the purest snow with
<em>Envy</em>&rsquo;s stains!<br />
The bright effusions of <em>his</em> muse
sublime,<br />
While Taste, and Genius live, shall ne&rsquo;er
expire:<br />
<em>Thy</em> spurts of envy, thy malignant
rhyme<br />
With infamy shall die before their Sire!
(472-73)</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>The concluding image of this 1799 poem, suggesting
premature ejaculation, aptly illustrates the sharply
increased hostility and sexualized combat
characteristic of the postrevolutionary satiric
idiom.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Wolcot himself may have helped to set the tone of
sexual aggression, not only by exposing the
king&rsquo;s natural body, but also by turning his
attention to the increasingly powerful Prime Minister,
William Pitt. In the first of many satires addressed to
Pitt, "Epistle to a Falling Minister," Wolcot first of
all renders him a prude or worse: "A Joseph thou,
against the sex to strive&mdash; / Dead to those charms
that keep the world alive" (92). But most of his satire
follows the more sinister line of presenting Pitt as a
fiend from hell, comparing him to Oliver Cromwell and
to Cain among other arch-demons, and accurately
predicting (in a 1789 poem) Pitt&rsquo;s terrible
assault on civil liberties. "It cannot be long an
object of consideration with us whether to pity or
detest the writer and publisher who can submit to the
disgraceful labour of circulating such indecent
reflections on the brightest character . . . the idol
of the people of England," intoned the
<em>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em> (59.250-51). This
reviewer also impugned Wolcot&rsquo;s anger as unmanly
and ungenuine. Other criticisms of Wolcot in this era
preceding the <em>Anti-Jacobin</em>, though increasing
in number, also tended toward paternalistic correction
or toward the burlesque rather than violent aggression.
"Birch for Peter Pindar" (1788), by the prolific
Pindaromastix, constructs a bizarre scenario in which
the Privy Council puts Peter Pindar on trial for
conspiring to kill the king through constipation, by
quite literally "keep[ing] the key to his behind"
(17).<a href=
"#note9">[9]</a>
This poem also works through several stock criticisms,
depicting Wolcot as impotent and his muse as being "of
easy virtue and unblushing face" (51), but it lacks the
deadly earnestness of later satires such as
Gifford&rsquo;s. Remarkably, Pindaromastix is content
to let the blasphemous suggestion of Peter Pindar
sodomizing the king pass without comment. Given that
rumors were already circulating about Peter&rsquo;s
disloyal association with the lowliest members of the
royal household, assigning him a royal bedfellow
testifies to a sexual fantasy thoroughly at odds with
Pindaromastix&rsquo;s professed politics. When in 1800
Gifford revived the report of Wolcot&rsquo;s
involvement with a palace scullion, he put it&mdash;by
contrast&mdash;in the most strident moral terms,
causing a crisis in Wolcot&rsquo;s career.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>1789&rsquo;s <em>Brother Tom to Brother Peter</em>
(by "A Moonraker") takes the scatological approach to
more outrageous lengths. According to this allegory,
Wolcot&rsquo;s technique originated as a project
proposed to the king for catching the farts of the
great, a technology that predictably backfires on
Wolcot when his first subject&mdash;Benjamin West, the
royal favorite and frequent victim of Wolcot&rsquo;s
Royal Academy satires&mdash;"let[s] fly," like the
"daubing dog" he is, in the poet&rsquo;s face (25). The
devil, who appears in many of these satires (cp.
Gillray, <em>Satan in All His Glory</em>), then brokers
a contract between Wolcot and the Prince that allows
him to get his revenge on the king as a paid mouthpiece
of the Foxite Whigs. Though undeniably hostile, these
verses also owe much to Wolcot&rsquo;s own imagery and
technique. The first Regency crisis at this moment
helps to explain their partisan spirit (equally present
in versified defenses of Peter Pindar) and the
insistent comparisons between Peter and Falstaff that
arise at this time and persist into the nineteenth
century. This analogy is developed in a prose tract
addressed to the Prince by "Albion," warning him
against Wolcot and other low companions (12; cp.
Gifford 39). Paulson&rsquo;s oedipal and regressive
(oral-anal) models of contention are both already in
place in these works of 1788-89, and <em>Brother Tom to
Brother Peter</em> in particular suggests a political
lineage for the scatological extremes that Paulson
traces to Burke. If it is true that, for Gillray at
least, "figures on both sides of the channel share the
lowest common denominator of regression to orality and
anality" (200), then the discourse around Wolcot could
have provided the idiom adopted for these revolutionary
representations. Richard Godfrey provides several
visual analogues to Gillray&rsquo;s scatological
approach in <em>The French Invasion;
&mdash;or&mdash;John Bull, bombarding the
Bum-Boats</em> (1793), also analyzed by Paulson.
Godfrey suggests that Gillray must have influenced two
French cartoons of 1794, one of which depicts George
III&rsquo;s face, spewing bayonets, as the posterior of
a grotesque figure. Richard Newton&rsquo;s "extremely
daring" <em>Treason</em> (1798) shows John Bull farting
in the king&rsquo;s face (Godfrey 112), and it is
telling that Newton dedicated another of his prints to
"Peter Pindar, Prince of Satyrists," all the more
because Wolcot himself was never quite so extreme. The
early satires against him, however, already cultivate
the grotesque elision of difference and the sexual
violence later intensified by revolutionary conflict.
The image of Peter "keep[ing] the key to [the
King&rsquo;s] behind," in particular, encapsulates what
is remarkable in these early attacks on Wolcot,
conflating as it does satire and sexual aggression,
sodomy and scatology, and the two bodies of king and
scullion.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>None of these attacks denied Wolcot&rsquo;s innate
literary ability, as later critics would. <em>The
Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em>, even as it became more
hostile, preserved an atmosphere of serious literary
discussion and was the first to welcome him back to the
fold in 1791 when he came out against Paine and
Revolutionary France. "On the Abuse of Satire," a piece
of Isaac D&rsquo;Israeli&rsquo;s <em>A Defence of
Poetry</em> first published in the magazine, exhorts
the laureate (Warton) to punish Wolcot with satire,
since he continues to find ingenious ways of avoiding
legal prosecution for libel and sedition. Wolcot
himself, though, was surely pleased to note that his
abuse of satire had "waken[ed] all the fires" of
D&rsquo;Israeli, who claims that his "patriot zeal
inspires / [his] honest verse" (59.648).<a href=
"#note10">[10]</a>
D&rsquo;Israeli, like many of Wolcot&rsquo;s opponents,
is forced to adopt his tactics of character
assassination, calling Peter the pander to a muse who
"prostitutes [her] charms&mdash;for half a crown."
D&rsquo;Israeli reassures Warton somewhat comically
that since Peter "has made art a trade," his libelous
effusions will quickly be forgotten while
Warton&rsquo;s own encomia will "make all the King, the
Husband, Father, shine!" into eternity. This last
description also reinforces the increasing political
sensitivity of the king&rsquo;s domestic masculinity.
Soon enough, Wolcot took devastating aim at John
Nichols and his magazine in three publications,
including one of his trademark epistles, a pretended
reply fathered semi-convincingly on Nichols himself,
and a set of manuscript lyrics collected and
indignantly introduced by this pseudo-Nichols to the
ostensible shame of the bard.<a href=
"#note11">[11]</a>
Alongside its class snobbery and scurrilous hilarity
this poem also argues that truth cannot reside in a
periodical publication: "Truth," Peter declaims, "Lifts
her fair head, and looks with brow sublime / On all the
fading pageantries of time" (<em>Works</em> 271) and
especially on a magazine full of puffery, interest, and
sham learning. Here is an echo of the professionally
motivated argument against periodical verse that
Michael Gamer attributes to Wolcot&rsquo;s rival
Gifford. Nichols (or his reviewer Gough) nonetheless
reverses D&rsquo;Israeli&rsquo;s charge back on Wolcot
in reviewing this poem: "True satire, from Juvenal to
Churchill, has had Truth for its object" (60.439). But
by the time of Wolcot&rsquo;s anti-Paine and
anti-French poems of 1791, he is content to observe
that "Peter is a clever fellow, and now got on our
side" (61.930), reprinting two poems in the magazine to
demonstrate Peter&rsquo;s "improvement."<a href=
"#note12">[12]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Other critics were less conciliatory. Wolcot
continued his attacks on Pitt, even as he noted with
increasing bitterness and resignation the curbs on
freedom of speech that inhibited his work. This
persistence earned him a particularly influential enemy
in 1794 in the person of T. J. Mathias. Mathias not
only feels compelled to clarify his allusions to Pindar
by distinguishing Peter&rsquo;s "depravity and
malignity" from the patriotic lyricism of his ancient
namesake, as I mentioned earlier; he also delivers a
substantial analysis of Peter&rsquo;s political
apostasy, though pointedly confined to a note: "he has
perpetually reviled and held up to scorn every master
principle by which government and society are
maintained. I will not waste a verse on such a
character" (pt. 1, p. 50n.). Gary Dyer notes that
Mathias was widely praised for his "unequalled
manliness of sentiment" (25), adding that "people
recognized in Gifford and Mathias a pose of orthodoxy "
(30) that eventually trumped Wolcot&rsquo;s
anti-establishment masculinity (37).<a href=
"#note13">[13]</a>
At the same time, a radical publication of 1796,
<em>The Volunteer Laureate: or Fall of Peter
Pindar</em>, though it owes much of its superbly
pointed anti-monarchical satire to Wolcot, condemns him
for not being political <em>enough</em>. The liberal
media, however, in sources duly referenced by Mathias
and Gifford, continued to try to shelter Wolcot from
the worst abuse. (The concept of "liberal media" itself
is a current distortion with roots in the period,
carefully tended, if not originally planted, by the
<em>Anti-Jacobin</em> in 1797.) Wolcot, of course,
retaliated, but seems to have played into the
enemy&rsquo;s hands in a particularly ill-advised and
weakly argued satire of 1799, <em>Nil admirari, or a
Smile at a Bishop</em>. The epigraph, taken, as often,
from the poem itself, sets the tone by skewering "that
miserable imp Mathias." In exposing what he takes to be
the Bishop of London&rsquo;s obscenely extravagant
praise for Hannah More, Wolcot insists that good morals
don&rsquo;t make good art, suggesting also that the
Bishop&rsquo;s "high-toned morality" makes him an
unmanly critic: "I own Miss Hannah&rsquo;s life is very
good, / But then her verse and prose are very bad"
(lines 43-44). Wolcot&rsquo;s honorable motive, the
decline of criticism into flattery and partisanship in
this time of intense ideological conflict, is
compromised by spurious charges of plagiarism and
infantilizing, quasi-pornographic ridicule of
bluestockings&mdash;"an indecent and scurrilous
attack," as the <em>Anti-Jacobin</em> Review was quick
to point out, "on two of the most amiable, and
exemplary, characters of the age!" ("To the Soi-Disant
Peter Pindar" 472).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As often, Wolcot published the eponymous main piece
in a slim quarto followed by a number of more strictly
humorous afterpieces (to borrow an analogy from the
theater), among which "An Ode to the
Blue-Stocking-Club" and "An Ode to Some Robin
Red-Breasts in a Country Cathedral" (an attack on
church music) drew particularly angry replies. These
shorter poems allowed some critics to take on
Wolcot&rsquo;s sexual license and religious irreverence
without addressing the more serious context provided by
the longer poem: the sophisticated anticlerical satire
of the latter, for example, gives way to a facetious
comparison in the "Ode to Some Robin-Redbreasts"
between the choir of robins and the venal pomp of
"Bishop, Dean, and bawling Boys" (<em>Nil admirari</em>
p. 56). <em>Nil admirari</em> itself takes its title
from the sixth epistle of the first book of Horace,
adapted by Wolcot to implicate Bishop Porteus&rsquo;
admiration of More (lines 105-06). Howard Weinbrot
notes that Wolcot adapts Horace by "turn[ing] away from
the modest disclaimer of the world&rsquo;s attractions
and towards his own more vigorous attack" (199), and
thus compounding (for some readers) the literary
offense. This elaborate 300-line adaptation, addressed
to the Bishop, argues convincingly in places that
posterity will revalue many of the literary judgments
of the day as obscured by "clouds of prejudice" and the
"varnish" of flattery, but undercuts the argument with
images as frivolous as any in the shorter poems: "And
lo, this varnish with thy daubing brush / Smear&rsquo;d
o&rsquo;er Miss Hannah must by time be roasted, / The
nymph in all her nakedness will blush, / And courtly
Porteus, for a flatterer posted" (125-28). By imagining
Hannah More naked Wolcot advances a largely distinct
line of satirical attack on the partisan criticism of
the age (his ideological view of which, though applied
unfairly to More, still holds true as a whole): his own
heterosexually charged masculinity rides triumphant (as
he imagines) over the flattering prudes who control the
reviews. More again unfairly bears the brunt of this
indictment of male critics of Jacobinism and sexual
morality, as Peter, in the words of his own Miltonesque
"argument," "severely reprimandeth her uncharitableness
toward the frail ones of her own sex" (see lines
153-68). His reprimand not only eroticizes the relation
between More and Porteus but uses allegory to inject a
charge of plagiarism: "Some years ago I saw a female
race; / The prize a shift&mdash;a Holland shift, I
ween: / Ten damsels, nearly all in naked grace, /
Rush&rsquo;d for the precious prize along the green"
(193-96). The winner of this race, notes Peter, cheated
the others by accepting help from her lover, who
carried her part of the way on a mule, just as Porteus
supposedly supplied his prose to More: "Did no kind
swain his hand to Hannah yield&mdash; / No
bishop&rsquo;s hand to help a heavy rear, / And bear
the nymph triumphant o&rsquo;er the field?" (210-12).
To complete the outrage, Wolcot then adapts images
familiar in the 1790s from representations of the
September Massacres to a caustic declaration of his
"love for bishops" (253). Porteus and his kind are, at
any rate, more loveable than their medieval
counterparts who persecuted heretics and nonbelievers:
"Grill&rsquo;d, roasted, carbonaded, fricaseed, / Men,
women, children, for the slightest things; / Burnt,
strangled, glorying in the horrid deed; / Nay,
starv&rsquo;d and flogg&rsquo;d God&rsquo;s great
vicegerents, Kings!" (265-68). The volume concludes
with a parody of a disinterested review of the
preceding verse, but Wolcot points the moral to be sure
we don&rsquo;t miss it: the reviewers of this
acrimonious time are his real targets in this satire,
"despicable Pimps, hired to debauch the Public Taste"
(p. 64).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>At this point even William Cobbett took up the cry
against Wolcot, and many less unlikely defenders also
came to the aid of Religion and Virtue as personified
by Bishop Porteus and More. Cobbett, then in the United
States, collected and reprinted the anti-Wolcot verses
and numerous diatribes in prose from the
<em>Anti-Jacobin Review</em> as an appendix to Richard
Polwhele&rsquo;s <em>The Unsex&rsquo;d Females</em>, a
poem that makes no mention of Wolcot but must have
seemed to Cobbett to make a marketable
combination.<a href=
"#note14">[14]</a>
Certainly <em>Nil admirari</em> is no less misogynistic
than <em>The Unsex&rsquo;d Females</em>, but
Wolcot&rsquo;s eroticism unmasks the damsel in distress
as a sex object, an ideological move that accounts for
much of the outcry against him. This reaction seems to
support Tim Fulford&rsquo;s contention that "chivalric
manhood did not die; it was relocated to the middle
classes" (9). Fulford&rsquo;s study traces
Coleridge&rsquo;s long struggle to revise Burke&rsquo;s
view of "chivalry, beauty, and sublimity" (11), and his
anxiety over his lack of public influence. Ironically
in this context, Coleridge&rsquo;s most widely quoted
remark on Wolcot excoriates him for publishing
scurrilous remarks on Mary Robinson in a 1783 poem.
Writing to Robinson&rsquo;s daughter in 1801, Coleridge
admonishes her to omit the mention of Robinson&rsquo;s
long friendship with Wolcot in the preface to a
posthumous volume of her poems: "my flesh creeps at his
name!" (qtd. in Girtin 221). Wolcot himself reprimanded
Gifford for insulting Robinson, to which Gifford
replied, ostensibly addressing Robinson, that she would
do better to rely for protection on a "broken reed"
(qtd. in Clark 107). William Hazlitt, not to be
outdone, reiterated the defense of Robinson against
Gifford: "His attacks on Mrs. Robinson were unmanly"
(125). Wolcot&rsquo;s treatment of More provoked
commensurably greater outrage, and the critics of
<em>Nil admirari</em> coded their chivalry in more
strictly Burkean, and political, terms: "Yet Walcot
becks the dire banditti on, / And smiles complacent
o&rsquo;er his country&rsquo;s tomb" (<em>Peter Not
Infallible</em> 25).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>William Gifford proved to be the greatest knight of
them all in his chastisement of the dragon Peter
Pindar. He not only exposed Wolcot&rsquo;s inmost vices
and defended his victims but defeated him in
hand-to-hand combat. It was so much the worse for the
now 62-year-old Wolcot that he was the aggressor,
attempting to chastise Gifford for the brutal slanders
of his <em>Epistle to Peter Pindar</em> and
particularly for his allusion to the 1788-89 Birdcage
Walk affair in a postscript to the second edition.
Wolcot thus gave him the opportunity to make good his
claim in the poem that he was "Prepared each threat to
baffle or to spurn, / Each blow with ten-fold vigour to
return," a vindication Gifford noted eagerly for his
readers in his third edition (37) (in which he also
quoted the full text of the 1789 <em>Times</em> account
for good measure). Their combat was itself the subject
of much dispute and of numerous verse satires,
including Alexander Geddes&rsquo;s
<em>Bardomachia</em>, but the most widely credited
account suggests that Gifford beat Wolcot bloody with
his own stick. This success flattered Gifford&rsquo;s
literary ambitions, and the third edition of his
epistle, published soon after the combat, swelled to
forty pages of prose superadded to the 172-line poem.
Gifford&rsquo;s prose apparatus conveniently quotes at
length or paraphrases all the recent invective against
Wolcot in the <em>Anti-Jacobin Review</em> and
elsewhere, consolidating the improbable catalogue of
vices imputed to Wolcot and rehearsing the more meager
criticisms of his verse. These criticisms take
Wolcot&rsquo;s satirical tactic of "comparing great
things with small" in deadly and ludicrous earnest as
threatening to the state: "we allude to his
observation, in one of his libellous productions, (we
forget which) that Kings, like candles, are better for
snuffing, i.e. taking off their heads" (Cobbett 64; cp.
Gifford 51n.). Gifford gleefully summarizes more
seditious passages and all the charges of vulgarity,
sodomy, drunkenness, whoring, impotence, cowardice,
bribe-taking, cruelty, and blasphemy, all supported by
improbable "authentic" anecdotes from the poet&rsquo;s
"friends" and presented with "manly confidence" (42):
"I have rescued Dignity, and Worth, and Talents, and
Virtue, and Religion, from the malignant attacks of
their bitterest foe" (53). The volume and tone of
Gifford&rsquo;s compendium attest to a level of
hysteria now associated with orthodox masculinity that
exceeds even the intensity of conflict during the first
Regency crisis&mdash;one possible explanation for his
digging up the <em>Times</em> account of Wolcot&rsquo;s
intercourse with a royal scullion in the Birdcage
Walk.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The old sodomy charge performs a labor of sexual
aggression that is difficult to accommodate in
Gifford&rsquo;s own poetic idiom. Gifford&rsquo;s
satire contains nothing comparable even to the mild
innuendo quoted earlier from "To the Soi-Disant Peter
Pindar": "Thy spurts of envy, thy malignant rhyme, /
With infamy shall die before their Sire" (473).
Gifford&rsquo;s scorn, like his use of the cane,
carries its libidinal content as a subtext, in a manner
that the paradox "hysterical masculinity" may help to
elucidate. His intense emotion refuses embodiment,
subsisting on a plane of moral outrage that Wolcot
himself associates with prudery and repression. Put
another way, Gifford&rsquo;s punishing masculinity
rises above the ribald homosocial combat of earlier
times, leaving behind the natural body to inhabit the
beleaguered divine body of royalty and of the kingdom.
He sublimates his own sadistic pleasure by means of a
threefold strategy. First, Gifford&rsquo;s impoverished
stock of metaphors keeps his victim anchored firmly in
the sphere of the savage and subhuman (dog, snake,
toad, Mohawk, sot, profligate, dotard), in a grotesque
conflation of human and animal bodies. Second, he keeps
the focus on his victim&rsquo;s grotesquely debased
desires, admitting none of his own, but also observes a
certain decorum: Peter Pindar is "a prodigy of
drunkenness and lust" (line 98) with an added measure
of sacrilege, deviating in recognizable ways from
recognizable norms.<a href=
"#note15">[15]</a>
Finally, Gifford hints at and then introduces the
<em>Times</em> articles as supporting evidence, as
neutral facts that on the one hand prove his superior
objectivity but on the other hand cannot implicate his
own imagination because derived from an external
source&mdash;in fact, the charge is more obscene than
anything fancied in the verse. The journalistic record
(if taken as fact) answers Wolcot&rsquo;s grotesque and
blasphemous conflation of the king&rsquo;s two bodies
by exposing the truth of his desire, his own corrupted
masculinity.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Gifford&rsquo;s "documentation" of his charges is
complicated by the legal status of sodomy allegations,
on the one hand, and by the currency of sodomy in
political rhetoric, on the other. These are large
issues, and here I hope only to sketch in the immediate
context of the <em>Times</em> articles that would have
made even sympathetic readers of Gifford aware of the
rhetorical nature of these charges, before moving
briefly to an analogous image by Gillray, <em><a href=
"../images/gillray_hopes.html">
The Hopes of the Party</a></em> (1791), as an
illustration of the continued currency of sodomy as an
image of sedition.<a href=
"#note16">[16]</a>
Given the absence of any corroborating evidence in the
biographical record, it makes sense to classify the
insinuations of the <em>Times</em> with other spurious
charges of sodomy. David Garrick successfully rebuffed
the charge of William Kenrick&rsquo;s satirical verses,
<em>Love in the Suds</em> (1772), that he had engaged
in illicit relations with the playwright Isaac
Bickerstaffe, who had fled the country on the basis of
a newspaper report on his relations with a soldier
(McCormick 162). Samuel Foote won his case in court
against his former coachman who had him indicted for
assault "with Intent to Commit Buggery" in 1776 (qtd.
in Goldsmith 99). Netta Goldsmith points out that in
Foote&rsquo;s case <em>The Public Ledger</em>, whose
editor Foote had mocked, originally published this
charge and continued to maintain it even after his
legal victory, contributing in her view to
Foote&rsquo;s death by a stroke in 1777 (104).
Goldsmith cites Jeremy Bentham&rsquo;s manuscript essay
on "Paederasty" (c. 1785) for evidence that sodomy
allegations, given the legal status of the crime, were
very difficult to refute and therefore an easy avenue
for blackmail (97). It may be true that Bentham would
have been exiled if he had published this essay (21),
but a similar argument was made in print by one of
Wolcot&rsquo;s staunchest defenders in 1800. In March
1789, following a number of sarcastic references to
Wolcot&rsquo;s disloyalty in the preceding months, the
<em>Times</em> announced that "there is now a Kitchen
Rat at Buckingham-House, that was caught about twelve
months since, in a trap with Peter Pindar, in the
Bird-Cage Walk," threatening serious consequences "if
this same Rat and Peter Pindar continue their disloyal
and ******** intercourse" (3/19/89, 2d). Two more
allusions to this affair continue to develop a larger
account of how Wolcot obtained his information about
the royal family and who paid him (a "fallen print,"
perhaps the <em>Morning Chronicle</em>) to write it
up.<a href=
"#note17">[17]</a>
In his <em>Admonitory Epistle to William Gifford</em>,
Thomas Dutton took Gifford severely to task for
reviving these allegations against Wolcot. As editor of
the <em>Dramatic Censor</em>, Dutton would have
remembered the spurious charges against Garrick and
Foote. Even more important, Dutton remembered and was
willing to remind the public that in its earliest years
the <em>Times</em> routinely engaged in this sort of
political blackmail against perceived enemies of the
state: "What shall we say to the man, who brings
forward such an accusation, knowing it to be false!
knowing, that the very newspaper, on which he rests his
charge, has been prosecuted for dealing in this very
species of libel! knowing, as he must, that the
fabricator of the report (now dead, the late Mr.
Finney, a name notorious for profligacy . . . ) was in
the habit of making this charge an engine of
extortion," further cases of which Dutton goes on to
specify ("Manners and Morals" 99).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>These accusations, then, at least in the
prerevolutionary context, would have appeared no more
serious than Kenrick&rsquo;s <em>Love in the Suds</em>.
Even Kenrick invokes a satirical tradition more
respectable than periodical prose by alluding to
Charles Churchill&rsquo;s <em>The Rosciad</em> in one
of his subtitles, "Being the Lamentation of Roscius for
the Loss of his Nyky." As Howard Weinbrot demonstrates,
the charge of sodomy incorporated into homosocial
satirical combat has its roots in a political tradition
epitomized in Pope&rsquo;s <em>Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot</em>. By depicting John, Baron Hervey as
"Sporus, the male whore of Nero" (190), Pope charges
that "protection of the satirist is replaced" in the
court of George II "by hostility to the satirist,
especially if he opposes the sexual deviance that is an
emblem of political deviance. The poem . . . becomes an
effort to stop the sodomizing of Britain" (190). By a
"devolution of satiric kinds" the charge of sodomy
becomes a vehicle of merely personal satire in
Garrick&rsquo;s <em>Fribbleriad</em> (1761) and of
grotesquely overblown Juvenalian indignation in
Churchill&rsquo;s <em>The Times</em> (1764), Weinbrot
argues (195). Wolcot, by contrast, remains more fully
in touch with social reality, but he abandons the
Horatian aspirations still present in Pope: sodomy
drops out of the picture in Wolcot because "he is most
at home strutting and raging among ruins" (202),
resigned to a political climate in which there is no
longer any point in attacking vice at all. Weinbrot
does not discuss Wolcot&rsquo;s reception, but his
argument about Churchill helps to illuminate the merely
personal, politically non-substantive charges
(including sodomy) leveled by his critics. In fact,
Churchill is cited in at least two attacks on Wolcot:
the <em>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em> review quoted
above and the anonymous <em>Poetical Epistle to John
Wolcot</em> (1790), which takes its epigraph from
Churchill&rsquo;s <em>Epistle to William
Hogarth</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Some of Wolcot&rsquo;s critics, however, did see
themselves as setting out to "stop the sodomizing of
Britain," and in the context of the Revolution the
charge of sodomy&mdash;of sodomizing the king
especially&mdash;takes on a kind of political weight
unaccounted for by Weinbrot&rsquo;s model. Even the
frivolous charge of Finney in the <em>Times</em> (if
Dutton is right about his authorship) insinuates
violence against the king by a fairly transparent
substitution of a servant&rsquo;s body (the "Kitchen
Rat") for the sovereign&rsquo;s natural body. In the
postrevolutionary context the image haunts the public
imagination, attested by the renewed currency of this
charge prompted by Gifford and also in graphic satire.
Thomas Dermody ("Mauritius Moonshine") is one partisan
who takes up Gifford&rsquo;s case, alluding darkly in
<em>The Battle of the Bards</em> to "such odious hints
as his [Wolcot&rsquo;s] own manhood stain" (qtd. in
Clark 110). Newton&rsquo;s <em>Treason</em> and the
French cartoons cited earlier, which bring the king and
the anus into dangerous proximity, are also relevant
here. But the most striking visual image of this kind
is Gillray&rsquo;s <em>The Hopes of the Party</em>,
prior to July 14th (1791; Fig. 1), which has no
apparent connection to Wolcot. Gillray puts John Horne
Tooke in the position of royal sodomizer. Godfrey is
the only commentator I have found who addresses this
rather obvious representation directly: "The position
of Tooke, who spreads the King&rsquo;s legs and thrusts
his own body between them, is outrageously suggestive"
(93). The image projects the execution of George III,
organized by Tooke, Fox, Joseph Priestley, Sheridan,
and Sir Cecil Wray. Tooke stands at left; Fox, at
center, holds the axe over George&rsquo;s hapless neck;
and the other three cluster at right offering
consolation to the king as Sheridan holds his head in
place on the block.<a href=
"#note18">[18]</a>
Pitt and Queen Charlotte dangle suggestively from the
lamps above the Crown &amp; Anchor sign. As Godfrey
points out, "it is an extraordinary and gross satire,
which would not have been possible to publish after the
guillotining of Louis XVI in 1793." For Paulson,
however, this image is part of an unfolding grotesque
narrative, and he argues that later images of Louis
XVI, including "even Gillray&rsquo;s print of the
execution of Louis XVI in 1793, should be compared with
the earlier mock execution he projects of George III"
(193). The king too has a speech bubble reading "What!
What! What! what&rsquo;s the matter now?" Godfrey
suggests that George&rsquo;s "bewildered innocence"
takes "some of the sting . . . out of the design," but
it seems likely that Gillray&rsquo;s audience would
have remembered Wolcot&rsquo;s persistent mockery of
the king&rsquo;s explosive speech and other
idiosyncrasies dating from 1785 up to the present. They
might well have taken Gillray&rsquo;s image as
continuing Wolcot&rsquo;s grotesque narrative, a
narrative that forcibly separated the king&rsquo;s two
bodies for dubious political ends. Gillray&rsquo;s
admirers&mdash;those not shocked or outraged by the
image&mdash;would surely have identified with the
tradition of grossly embodied masculine patriotism
developed by Wolcot and maintained against mounting
criticism through and beyond the contentious moment of
<em>The Hopes of the Party</em>. Loyalist readers of
the print, on the other hand, were probably more than
willing to associate the veteran dissident Tooke (born
1736) with another grizzled profligate known for his
designs on the backside of the divine national body:
Peter Pindar.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Wolcot himself recovered sufficiently from the
assaults of Gifford, Dermody, and others to answer much
of their abuse in <em>Out at Last</em> (1801), in which
he was supported by a convenient accident of history:
the fall of Pitt. His subtitle, "The Fallen Minister,"
triumphantly echoes his "Epistle to a Falling Minister"
of eleven years before. Wolcot&rsquo;s patriotism gains
new force from his renewed ability to ventriloquize
"Old England&rsquo;s genius," which thus addresses Pitt
in the poem: "Harpoon&rsquo;d at last, thou
flound&rsquo;ring porpoise&mdash; / Thou who hast
swallowed all my rights, / Gobbling the mightiest just
like the mites&mdash; / Devouring like a sprat my
habeas corpus. / Thou, who didst bind my sons in
chains, / . . . For fear their wrath might kindle riot"
(lines 73-84). Only after celebrating the
nation&rsquo;s liberty does Wolcot turn to his more
narrowly literary concerns, condemning Pitt&rsquo;s
gagging of the Muse, exposing Gifford and Mathias as
the prime minister&rsquo;s hirelings (204n.), and
reserving for Gifford the particular fate of being
hanged in a note&mdash;taking his cue archly from
Mathias&rsquo;s attack on him (127n.). Wolcot&rsquo;s
account of Gifford as a hypocrite, parvenu, sycophant,
seducer, and pander to his aristocratic patron is no
more truthful than Gifford&rsquo;s attacks on him, but
it includes some substantive criticism of
Gifford&rsquo;s verse and above all it is playful and
ironic. Wolcot&rsquo;s note brilliantly parodies all
the earnest strategies of character assassination
practiced by Gifford and the <em>Anti-Jacobin
Review</em>. The poem then concludes with a procession
of the people taking their revenge on their erstwhile
oppressor: authors, printers, shoemakers led by Thomas
Hardy, washerwomen, politicians, even cats and dogs are
finally free to speak their minds. At this point,
alluding again to Pitt&rsquo;s apparently asexual
nature, Wolcot enlists the women of England in the
cause of his own unrepenant, libertine, eccentric
masculinity:</p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>And, see! the girls around thee throng<br />
"Art thou the wight, thus stretch&rsquo;d
along,<br />
An enemy well known to wives and misses?<br />
Art thou the man who dost not care<br />
For oglings, squeezes of the fair;<br />
Nay, makest up wry mouths at woman&rsquo;s
kisses?"<br />
Then shall the nymphs apply their birchen
rods,<br />
And baste thee worse than Peter Pindar&rsquo;s
Odes.</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>Apart from occasional references to this apparently
deviant sexuality and to Pitt&rsquo;s drunkenness, Wolcot
does not expose the Prime Minister&rsquo;s natural body
as avidly as the king&rsquo;s. The commoner Pitt lacks
the "body of signs," the divine body that gives
Wolcot&rsquo;s satires on the king their semiotic energy.
But on some level Marin&rsquo;s definition of
caricature&mdash;an image presenting "the natural body"
as "the truth of the body of signs"&mdash;extends to all
caricature and especially visual caricature. Thus Gillray
seizes on Pitt&rsquo;s rail-thin figure to create some of
his most memorable political satires, such as <em>Sin,
Death, and the Devil</em> (1792) and <em>Presages of the
Millennium</em> (1795). By way of contrast, <em>A Sphere
Projecting against a Plane</em> (1793), which features
Pitt "projecting" against the rotund Mrs. Hobart,
illustrates the comparatively depoliticized humor of the
corpulent body in Gillray. Although Gifford calls Wolcot
"a bloated mass," Wolcot&rsquo;s corpulence in and of
itself pales as a political vice next to his insistent
embodiment both of the king and of his own national
sentiment. Pat Rogers (182) and Denise Gigante (ch. 8)
have both suggested, in very different contexts, that fat
becomes politicized, and takes on a peculiar moral
stigma, only with the advent of the Regency and the
growing waistline of "great George" IV. If the royal body
is no longer sacred, caricatures like Thackeray&rsquo;s
(in his sketch of Louis XIV and his verbal sketch of
George IV as Jos Sedley in <em>Vanity Fair</em>) become
permissible as liberal discourse. Wolcot&rsquo;s earlier
satires contributed to this revolutionary process. Yet
the grotesque, libidinal, broadly transgressive masculine
contest between Wolcot and his antagonists carried older
forms of patriotism forward into the polarized debate
over the French Revolution. Wolcot&rsquo;s insistence on
the appetitive natural body as the seat of political
agency has deep roots in English popular tradition. The
subject&rsquo;s desiring body, as James I recognized in
<em>A Counterblast to Tobacco</em> (1616), is at odds
with the divine body of the sovereign, or with his
divinely authorized demand for laboring and fighting
subjects. By the time of George III, even the
king&rsquo;s defenders were presenting him in a role that
seems to compromise the doctrine of the king&rsquo;s two
bodies, namely as a paragon of domestic masculinity.
Wolcot&rsquo;s critics, then, were not championing the
king&rsquo;s divine body so much as domestic masculinity
and war culture. Among Michael Moore&rsquo;s critics,
too, the profanely embodied masculinity that is
supposedly repressed in political discourse returns as a
fascination with the transgression that has shadowed
patriotism as a word and a practice since at least the
eighteenth century.</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="notes_content">
<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p>I would like to thank Joshua Gonsalves, Brad Prager, and
Orrin Wang for insightful comments and bibliographical
suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.</p>
<p class="indent">1.<a name="note1" id="note1"></a>
According to the <em>OED</em>, in the late seventeenth
century "patriot" was "applied to one who supported the
rights of the country against the King and court. . . .
Hence the name itself fell into discredit in the earlier
half of the 18th c., being used, according to Dr. Johnson,
&lsquo;ironically for a factious disturber of the
government'" (II.2099). Many examples from the 1790s bear
out this point: caustic references to John Wilkes as a
"patriot" in the <em>Times</em> (3/19/1788); Gillray's
<em>Patriotic Regeneration</em> (1795), envisioning a
Jacobin Parliament with Fox as Robespierre; and pieces in
the first <em>Anti-Jacobin</em> (1797-98) such as the
letter of "A Batchelor." Ironically, Wolcot may have been
closer to the nonpartisan Toryism of Henry, Viscount
Bolingbroke in <em>The Idea of a Patriot King</em> (1738)
than was George III, whose patriotism very much involved
partisan politics and royal prerogative.</p>
<p class="indent">2<a name="note2" id="note2"></a>. This is
a selective list. Although there is only one numerical
estimate of Wolcot&rsquo;s sales, ample anecdotal evidence
suggests that it is at least not wildly exaggerated:
"According to Cyrus Redding [a relative] in what is
possibly an exaggeration, at the height of this period of
his fame between twenty and thirty thousand copies of his
work were sold in a single day" (Girtin 113).</p>
<p class="indent">3<a name="note3" id="note3"></a>. Wolcot
was a wide-ranging man of letters who worked in many other
forms besides the satires that concern me here, beginning
with the sentimental <em>Elegy</em> for William Boscawen
that launched his London career (1768; 1779). He produced
occasional satires in his native Cornwall and in Jamaica
before coming to London in 1781. After the success of his
Royal Academy odes he also published, over the next thirty
years, art criticism (as well as a volume of aquatints of
his own landscapes); dramatic prologues, epilogues, and
criticism; opera librettos and translations; reviews in the
<em>Monthly Review</em> (1793-96); a blank verse tragedy,
<em>The Fall of Portugal</em>; and a wide variety of other
verse, including beast fables, romantic tales, and
significant contributions (along with Robert Burns) to
George Thomson&rsquo;s <em>A Select Collection of Scottish
Airs</em>. His serious verse is reminiscent of James
Thomson in diction and sentiment.</p>
<p class="indent">4<a name="note4" id="note4"></a>. Tom
Girtin points out that Wolcot may have suggested this role
for himself and that Opie in any case included himself in
this picture as well as the "fiercer" of the two assassins
(111). As in so many cases the political signification is
much more equivocal than in Manlius&rsquo;s strict
ideological reading (and is complicated further by the
biographical facts of Wolcot&rsquo;s relationship with
Opie).</p>
<p class="indent">5<a name="note5" id="note5"></a>.
Wolcot&rsquo;s most political poems in this sense include
<em>A Commiserating Epistle to Lord Lonsdale</em> (1791)
and <em>Resignation; An Ode to the Journeymen
Shoemakers</em> (1794).</p>
<p class="indent">6<a name="note6" id="note6"></a>. Many
other prints bear witness to Wolcot&rsquo;s influence.
<em>Affability</em> (1795) takes up the King&rsquo;s habit
of engaging laborers in conversation, as lampooned
extensively by Wolcot. <em>Satan in All His Glory, or Peter
Pindar Crouching to the Devil</em> (1792) is particularly
important for its portrait of the man himself and for its
Oedipal misreading of the poem referenced in the image, the
"Conciliatory Ode" to Lord Lonsdale (see further M. Dorothy
George 951-52).</p>
<p class="indent">7<a name="note7" id="note7"></a>. When
Wolcot sued his publisher in 1801, Lord Eldon refused to
grant the injunction he was seeking on the grounds that his
works were "libellous publications" (qtd. in Girtin 219).
But he was never prosecuted in his own right. Gillray,
according to Paulson, was "drawn into the arms of the
Tories . . . by a blasphemy prosecution arising from a 1796
print showing Fox and Sheridan as Magi" (184), and agreed
to produce propagandistic images in return for a
pension.</p>
<p class="indent">8<a name="note8" id="note8"></a>. As it
turned out, Peter&rsquo;s severity would grow much worse
before he mended, though the increasingly harsh reviews in
this magazine, as well as other criticisms through the
early 90s purporting to speak for the king and the nation,
maintain the aggrieved paternal tone used by the king
himself (for example) in his proclamations to the
rebellious colonies in 1775.</p>
<p class="indent">9<a name="note9" id="note9"></a>. Wolcot
alludes to a meeting of the Privy Council concerning
himself as early as 1787 in <em>Ode upon Ode</em>: "No!
Free as air the Muse shall spread her wing, / Of whom, and
when, and what she pleases sing: / Though privy councils,
jealous of her note, / Prescribed, of late, a halter for
her throat" (<em>Works</em> 278). The OCLC database
identifies Pindaromastix as Joseph Reed, also a possible
collaborator of William Kenrick on <em>Love in the
Suds</em> and hence&mdash;assuming both attributions are
correct&mdash;a veteran fabricator of sodomy charges.</p>
<p class="indent">10<a name="note10" id="note10"></a>.
Johnson&rsquo;s definition notwithstanding (see note 1),
"patriot" occurs here and in a few other anti-Wolcot texts
in its straightforward sense, which may have experienced a
resurgence by the 1790s. Canning, in <em>New Morality</em>,
uses the word numerous times in both its straightforward
and ironic senses.</p>
<p class="indent">11<a name="note11" id="note11"></a>.
Nichols actually had printed at least one early manuscript
poem of Wolcot&rsquo;s submitted by a correspondent
(<em>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</em> 58.733).</p>
<p class="indent">12<a name="note12" id="note12"></a>.
Nichols excerpted a significant portion of "The
Remonstrance" in this review and printed "The Magpie and
the Robin," one of Wolcot&rsquo;s characteristic beast
fables, in full in the poetry section of this issue. From
this point the magazine is noticeably conciliatory toward
Wolcot: "Peter, under affliction, improveth" (62.155).</p>
<p class="indent">13<a name="note13" id="note13"></a>.
Dyer&rsquo;s superb calendar of satirical publications
between 1789 and 1832 provided me with crucial references
for this article. He is also one of several critics to
highlight Wolcot&rsquo;s influence on Lord Byron (3).</p>
<p class="indent">14<a name="note14" id="note14"></a>.
Cobbett must have forgotten his earlier partisanship by
1816, because in that year he incorporated a defense of
Wolcot against Gifford in a criticism of the latter, by
that time editor of the <em>Quarterly Review</em>, in his
P<em>olitical Register</em> (qtd. in Clark 109). Wolcot had
in fact been an early patron of Polwhele&rsquo;s and
Polwhele never repudiated him (see further Girtin 210).</p>
<p class="indent">15<a name="note15" id="note15"></a>.
Wolcot&rsquo;s actual career in vice must have paled by
comparison to the excesses of which he was accused in
print. But in what seems a curious instance of life
imitating art, Wolcot was tried for criminal conversation
with his landlady and acquitted in June 1807, when he was
69. The enraged (or opportunistic) husband charged that
Wolcot pretended to serve his wife as an acting coach. The
couple&rsquo;s servants provided (ultimately ineffective)
testimony that might well have been drawn from the body of
satire on Wolcot. See further Girtin 226-223.</p>
<p class="indent">16<a name="note16" id="note16"></a>.
Previous discussion of Wolcot&rsquo;s real sexual
proclivities has been limited to pointing out that although
he remained unmarried, his close relationships with much
younger male prot&eacute;g&eacute;s (Opie most
famously)"Though they "would in the twentieth century be
regarded with some reserve" (Girtin 60) "were attended by
"no contemporary breath of scandal" (67).</p>
<p class="indent">17<a name="note17" id="note17"></a>. The
numerous and tantalizing references to Peter Pindar in the
<em>Times</em> beginning in 1787 deserve much more
extensive treatment than I can give them here.</p>
<p class="indent">18<a name="note18" id="note18"></a>.
Priestley considerately advises the king not to trouble
himself about a future state. Priestley also features more
centrally in another Gillray print published the same week,
which brings out the blasphemy in <em>The Hopes of the
Party</em>. In <em>A Birmingham Toast</em>, Priestley gives
the toast "The K[ing&rsquo;s] Head, here!" while holding up
an empty communion dish.</p>
</div>
<div id="wc_content">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">"Albion." <em>Four Pleasant Epistles,
Written for the Entertainment and Gratification of Four
Unpleasant Characters</em>. London : Printed for W. Priest,
1789.</p>
<p class="hang">"A Batchelor." "Letter to the
Anti-Jacobin." <em>The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly
Examiner</em>. 4th ed. Vol. 1. London: Printed for J.
Wright, 1799. 258-61.</p>
<p class="hang">Canning, George. <em>Satires, Songs, and
Odes on Various Subjects</em>. In <em>The Works of Peter
Pindar</em>. London: Jones and Co., 1823. 319-30.</p>
<p class="hang">Clark, Roy Benjamin. <em>William Gifford:
Tory Satirist, Critic, and Editor</em>. New York: Columbia
UP, 1930.</p>
<p class="hang">[Cobbett, William, ed.] <em>The Unsex'd
Females; A Poem . . . to which is added, A Sketch of the
Private and Public Character of P. Pindar</em>. New York:
Re-published by William Cobbett, 1800.</p>
<p class="hang"><em>The Compact Edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary</em>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.</p>
<p class="hang">[D'Israeli, Isaac ]. "On the Abuse of
Satire." <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 59 (1789):
648-49.</p>
<p>[Dutton, Thomas.] <em>Admonitory Epistle to William
Gifford. The Dramatic Censor</em> 27 (July 1800):
33-59.</p>
<p class="hang">---. "Manners and Morals." <em>The Dramatic
Censor</em> 28 (August 1800): 98-100.</p>
<p class="hang">Fulford, Tim. <em>Romanticism and
Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings
of</em> <em>Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De
Quincey and Hazlitt.</em> Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang">Gamer, Michael. "' Bell's Poetics':
<em>The</em> <em>Baviad</em>, the Della Cruscans, and the
Book of <em>The World</em>." In <em>The Satiric Eye: Forms
of Satire in the Romantic Period</em>, ed. Steven E. Jones.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 31-53.</p>
<p class="hang">George, M. Dorothy. <em>Catalogue of
Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the
Department</em> <em>of Prints and Drawings in the British
Museum</em>. Vol. 6. London: British Museum, 1978.</p>
<p class="hang">Gigante, Denise. <em>Taste: A Literary
History</em>. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.</p>
<p class="hang">[Gifford, William.] <em>Epistle to Peter
Pindar</em>. 3rd ed. London: J. Wright, 1800.</p>
<p class="hang">Girtin, Tom. <em>Doctor with Two Aunts: A
Biography of Peter Pindar</em>. London: Hutchinson,
1959.</p>
<p class="hang">Godfrey, Richard. <em>James Gillray: The
Art of Caricature</em>. London: Tate Gallery, 2001.</p>
<p class="hang">Goldsmith, Netta Murray. <em>The Worst of
Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century
London</em>. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.</p>
<p>Hazlitt, William. <em>The Complete Works of William
Hazlitt</em>. Ed. P. P. Howe. Vol. 11. London: J. M. Dent
and Sons, 1930-34.</p>
<p class="hang">Lattimore, Richmond, trans. <em>The Odes of
Pindar</em>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1947.</p>
<p class="hang">McCormick, Ian, ed. <em>Secret Sexualities:
A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing</em>. London
and New York: Routledge, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang">"Manlius to Peter Pindar; with Stanzas on
seeing his Portrait." <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 58
(1788): 1044.</p>
<p class="hang">Marin, Louis. <em>Food for Thought</em>.
1986. Trans. Mette Hjort. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1989.</p>
<p class="hang">[Mathias, Thomas James.] <em>The Pursuits
of Literature. A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, with
Notes</em>. 1794. 2nd ed. London: Printed for J. Owen,
1796-97.</p>
<p class="hang">"A Moonraker." <em>Brother Tom to Brother
Peter, or, Peter Paid in His Own Pence: with the Articles
of Partnership between the Devil and Peter Pindar</em>.
London: Sold by J. Parsons, 1789.</p>
<p class="hang">Paulson, Ronald. <em>Representations of
Revolution (1789-1820)</em>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.</p>
<p class="hang"><em>Peter Not Infallible! A Poem; Addressed
to Peter Pindar, Esq</em>. Cambridge: Printed by M. Watson,
1800.</p>
<p class="hang">"Pindaromastix" [Joseph Reed]. <em>Birch
for Peter Pindar, Esq. A burlesque poem.</em> London:
Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1788.</p>
<p class="hang"><em>A Poetical Epistle to John Wolcot,
Commonly Known by the Appellation of Peter Pindar</em>.
London: Printed for George Riebau, 1790.</p>
<p class="hang">Rev. of <em>A Benevolent Epistle to
Sylvanus Urban</em>. <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 60
(1790): 439.</p>
<p class="hang">Rev. of <em>Brother Peter to Brother
Tom</em>. <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 58 (1788): 440.</p>
<p class="hang">Rev. of <em>Epistle to a Falling
Minister</em>. <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 59 (1789):
250-51.</p>
<p class="hang">Rev. of <em>More Money</em>.
<em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 62 (1792): 155.</p>
<p class="hang" p="">Rev. of <em>The Remonstrance.</em>
<em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 61 (1791): 930-31.</p>
<p class="hang">Rev. of <em>The Progress of Curiosity</em>.
<em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 57 (1787): 620.</p>
<p class="hang">Rogers, Pat. "Fat Is a Fictional Issue: The
Novel and the Rise of Weight-Watching." In <em>Literature
and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century</em> , ed. Marie
Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, 168-87. London: Routledge,
1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Sinko, Grzegorz. <em>John Wolcot and His
School: A Chapter from the History of English Satire</em>.
Wroclaw: Place Wroclawskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego,
1962.</p>
<p class="hang">"The Times." <em>Times</em> [ London ] 19
Mar. 1789: 2d.</p>
<p class="hang">"To the Soi-Disant &lsquo;Peter Pindar'"
[by "Pythias"]. <em>Anti-Jacobin Review</em> 2 (December
1799): 472-73.</p>
<p class="hang">"The Two Pindars, or, A Hint to Apollo" [by
G. B. R.]. <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em> 57 (1787):
818.</p>
<p class="hang"><em>The Volunteer Laureate: or Fall of
Peter Pindar</em> [by "Archilochus, Jun."]. London and New
York: Re-Printed by Mott &amp; Lyon, for Charles Smith,
1796.</p>
<p class="hang">Weinbrot, Howard. <em>Eighteenth-Century
Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter
Pindar</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">Wolcot, John ["Peter Pindar"]. <em>Nil
admirari; or, A Smile at a Bishop</em>. London : Printed by
W. and C. Spilsbury for West and Hughes, 1799.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <em>Out at Last. Or, The Fallen
Minister</em>. London: Printed by W. and C. Spilsbury for
West and Hughes, 1801.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <em>The Works of Peter Pindar,
Esq</em>. London: Jones and Co., 1823.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/heringman-noah">Heringman, Noah</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/william-gifford" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Gifford</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/866" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">French Revolution</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1612" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">masculinity</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1760" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">patriotism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/john-wolcot" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Wolcot</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/peter-pindar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter Pindar</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/title/gentlemans-magazine" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gentleman&#039;s Magazine</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1789" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">political satire</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/james-gillray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Gillray</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/george-iii" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George III</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1792" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">sodomy</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/peter-pindar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter Pindar</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michael-gamer-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Gamer</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ronald-paulson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ronald Paulson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-boswell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Boswell</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/george-iii" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George III</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-cobbett" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Cobbett</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-gifford" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Gifford</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-wilkes" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Wilkes</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-pitt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Pitt</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charles-james-fox" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles James Fox</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/thomas-paine-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Paine</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michael-moore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Moore</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/louis-xvi" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louis XVI</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-warton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Warton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-horne-tooke" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Horne Tooke</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-gillray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Gillray</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-brinsley-sheridan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Brinsley Sheridan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/noah-heringman-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Noah Heringman</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/tim-fulford-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tim Fulford</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/louis-marin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louis Marin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-opie" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Opie</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/edmund-burke" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edmund Burke</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/columbia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Columbia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/wales" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wales</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/missouri" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Missouri</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:39:23 +0000rc-admin22731 at http://www.rc.umd.edu